The hexagonal safety climate structure - proposing a new safety climate structure, and assessing its implications for the RNNP survey

Abstract

This master’s thesis paper proposes a new dimensional structure for the safety climate construct. The basis for this structure is data collected in the period 2001 – 2013 by the Petroleum Safety Authority Norway through the RNNP survey. The data material is vast; a total of 51 803 respondents have participated in the survey, making it the largest safety climate assessment conducted in the Norwegian oil and gas industry. The proposed dimensional structure was obtained through a dynamic combination of explorative Principal Component Analysis in SPSS and a qualitative and theoretical based assessment of the strength and structure of the data driven dimensional structures. The result of this repetitive process is presented as a six dimensional safety climate structure consisting of 30 items, given the name “The Hexagonal Safety Climate Structure”. The proposed dimensional structure of this thesis fits well with the three-dimensional basis of the RNNP survey. The proposed structure provides a theoretically supported and good psychometric solution to the dimensional structure of the safety climate construct of the RNNP survey. It is recommended that the 22 safety related questions that are not part of the dimensional structure are revised or removed from the RNNP survey. The assessment of safety climate and safety culture has major issues to overcome. No clear conceptual agreement exists, theoretical models are lacking and the validity of the measurement instruments is questionable. Until these issues are sorted, the use of surveys to measure safety climate will still have significant potential for improvement.