2. Method
An online survey, hosted by an external website, was used in this
study to gather perceptions of employees with regard to various
safety climate related survey items. The link to the survey questionnaire
was distributed to staff members of four different occupational
groups of the airline, which were flight crew, cabin crew,
engineers (mechanics), and ground/network operations staff. The
online survey portal was open for three weeks in November 2012
for data collection. Participation of the survey was completely
voluntary and anonymous, and no identifiable information was
collected from survey participants.
The survey questionnaire comprised three parts and was
developed from a survey instrument used in a previous study (Gao
et al., 2013). Part 1 of the questionnaire collected basic demographic
information such as gender, age (in ranges), years of
employment with the company, base, and employment position.
Part 2, related to general safety related items, and included 33
statements that asked participants to indicate their agreement or
disagreement with these statements on a five-point likert-scale
ranging from “Strongly agree” to “Strongly disagree”. All items were
reverse scored in the analyses so that higher scores represent
agreement. Among these statements, 30 items (1e30) were
designed around four safety themes; namely Safety Philosophy,
Safety Feedback, Safety Promotion and Communication, and Safety
Reporting. Item 31 was included to investigate the reporting preference
of employees, and Items 32 and 33 were designed to
compare perceptions of safety attitudes between the respondents'
own occupational group and other occupations. Part 3 of the survey
was intended for people who have used the safety reporting system
(SRS) in the past 12 months to report a safety occurrence. This part
was designed for a more in-depth analysis of the Safety Reporting
of the company, which was a deficient area identified in the previous
safety survey of the same company. Comments boxes were
provided in both Parts 2 and 3 to collect information that was not
captured by pre-structured survey items so that valuable opinions
of staff regarding safety would not be missed by the survey. While
the questions in Part 1 varied slightly to suit different occupational