Does the potential safety risk affect whether particular construction hazards are recognized or not?

This explored whether construction workers are more likely to recognise safety hazards of higher safety risk than those of relatively lower risk. That is, does the underlying risk imposed by a safety hazard affect whether it will be recognised or not?

287 workers across 57 construction companies were assessed via images of construction work (demonstrating various sources of harm, see example below).

Authors discuss previous findings – in one study where construction workers didn’t recognise up to 57% of safety hazards in their immediate work area.

Despite a plethora of interventions like JSAs, checklists and training the authors argue that a disproportionate number of safety hazards continue to remain unrecognised even when these interventions are used.

They argue that methods like JSAs may rely on unfounded assumptions, like workers being able to innately visualise the planned task and identify in advance the sources of variability & constraints.

Other assumptions include that planning will accurately reflect work in the field despite the dynamic and rapidly changing nature of construction work; tools not being optimised to enhance hazard recognition; and not designed to capture hazards imposed by other crews or parts of the business (e.g. a static view not considering the system interactions).

Tools, like checklists, may also “give a false sense of security when safety requirements as presented in the checklist is fulfilled although additional hazards may remain unrecognized and unmanaged” (p3).

And for safety training, it’s argued that it’s often not designed to be engaging or ensure that people retain or can apply the concepts in practice; not designed to explore why workers may not recognise hazards in the first place; and often designed in a manner more appropriate for children rather than adults.

These findings are tabulated below:

Results

Workers were more likely to recognise hazards that impose relatively higher levels of safety risks. In this model, for every 0.01 unit increase in the underlying safety risk, the likelihood of a particular safety hazard being recognised increased by 4.76%.

Hence, workers are far less likely to perceive and identify hazards of lower consequence.

It’s argued that the important insights from this study is that assumptions that recognising a hazard is the first step in injury prevention may be mis-ordered: the authors argue that the perception of threats is what triggers the recognition of safety hazards. Once perceived, then the threat can be identified.

[This may somewhat slightly support other research, eg Torbj?rn Rundmo, that it’s the source of risk that is consequently perceived rather than the risk itself & heavily influenced by affect & dread)]

Despite a number of study limitations (including the use of photo scenarios), it’s worth noting that the perception of the safety risk that a hazard imposes could only explain 38% of why workers may not identify hazards, and thus needs to be bolstered with other factors.

One example is the lower likelihood of identifying threats which are latent/dormant, such as where an unexpected release of energy can occur, in these cases where the relative risk isn’t visually identifiable, they are more likely to remain unidentified.

Link in comments.

Authors: Albert, A., Pandit, B., Patil, Y., & Louis, J. (2020). Journal of safety research, 75, 241-250.