3. Elements of safety culture and its scale
Currently, the research on the content and form of safety culture becomes diversified. On the Organization, building a
safety culture is in fact promoting employee’s understanding, implementation and application of safety culture. Specifically,
safety culture is a rather vague terms. You can understand, implement, and apply it well until you have already understood
the concept. In order to understand the concept of safety culture, academic research on its component element has begun. So
far during the 32 years almost all the studies have focused on confirming the key elements of safety culture and developing
the scales of those elements, and thus applied to the empirical study. The representative of the empirical study of the
element of safety culture has listed below in table1.
Through literature review, we can find there are two ways to do some research on elements of safety culture. One hand, it
is by summarizing the elements used in the past through literature review; On the other hand, it is by questionnaires
developed on the safety management elements to investigate the target organization's safety culture and then extracting
safety culture elements on the basis of data. As for the research content, these issues with existing are exploratory research
abroad more than systematic research, and little consensus has been reached on concept, dimension, and key elements and
the mutual relationship [14]. Also nothing can prove the validity and effective of the dimension and elements.
Elements of safety culture differ from study to study. The reason can be reflected in the following three aspects. First,
study samples were different. Thus, points on safety differently depending on several factors, especially the different
industry, management focus, and potential problems. That led the structure of the elements not the same. Second, study
methods were different. The tools involved mostly developed by researchers themselves. They developed their
questionnaire by documentary, panel discussion, depth interviews and other methods. While the questionnaire is in itself
controversial. As we all know, the questionnaire has the functional orientation. Its basic assumptions tend to benefit research
purposes and the investigation contents may be limited by the number of dimensions. It is not complete and does not exist in
practice. Judging from the content of the questionnaire, what survey is more abstract such as attitude, belief and value, all is
limited to the current state or just past state, can only reflect certain aspects of the safety culture snapshot [15]. In the end,
the understandings of connotation of safety culture were different. What is reflected in the extraction of variables, project
planning, different screening, different expressions, and named with individual's randomness