Development and validity and reliability assessment of a scale of work safety attitude-Chinese version

ObjectiveTo develop a Chinese version scale of work safety attitude and to assess its validity and reliability.MethodsBased on the measure of safety climate complied by Williamson and others,a Chinese version scale of safety attitude(27 items) was developed and 902 blue collar workers from 8 hardware manufacturing companies in Zhongshan municipality of Guangdong province were surveyed with the scale developed.Exploratory principal component factor analysis,confirmatory factor analysis,association validation,and inter-item consistency test were applied to assess the validity and reliability of the scale.ResultsWith the results of exploratory factor and principal component analysis,the Chinese work safety attitude scale was composed of 24 items covering 5 common factors:attitude toward safety policy,negative attitude,attitude toward manager,attitude toward safety practices,and optimistic attitude,respectively.The cumulative contribution reached to 56.435%.The total Cronbach's α coefficient(0.836) and half-split Spearman-Brown coefficient(0.718) of the scale indicated that the work safety attitude scale had good inter-item consistency.Confirmatory factor analysis revealed that the structural model of five dimensions was good,with the goodness-of-fit index(GFI) of 0.940,comparative fit index(CFI) of 0.939 and root mean square error of approximation(RMSEA) of 0.045(χ²/df=2.86,P<0.01).The correlation coefficients between each of the factors and the overall attitude ranged 0.310 – 0.755(P < 0.01) and the structure of the scale showed a good validity.The surveyed participants with a right overall safety attitude judged by the scale had significantly lower total score and factor scores,except for optimism factor,compared to those with an wrong overall safety attitude(all P <0.01),indicating the scale had good discriminant validity.ConclusionThe Chinese version work safety attitude scale developed has good reliability and validity and could be used in domestic research on control of occupational injury.