Assessing the workplace safety climate

When carrying out an OHS survey there are a lot of questions that one would like to ask. Due to restrictions of space, employees' time and, in particular, the attention span of the respondents, questionnaires or interviews must be restricted in length. Operating under just such restraints, the authors of this article were required to reduce the size of a large "safety climate" questionnaire while retaining its reliability and validity. The result was a six-item questionnaire which had excellent reliability and validity compared with the original, larger questionnaire. The development of such a short questionnaire allows those interested to examine an organisation's safety culture without the need for a larger research tool.