[Development of safety climate measurement at workplace: validity and reliability assessment].

Objective: To develop a measurement of safety climate at workplace and assess its validity and reliability.

Methods: According to the theory of preventive safety culture model, a scale including 7 dimensions of 27 items was developed. 342 workers were selected from among all workers of an artificial board factory and were investigated with the developed scale. Occupational accidents were recorded during the past year. Factor analysis, association validation and inter-item consistency test were applied to assess the scale validity and reliability.

Results: After the deletion of 6 items, 21 items composed the safety climate scale, which was loaded on 7 common factors: safety competence and consciousness, safety communication, organizational environment, management support, danger judgment, safety control measure and safety training. The cumulative contribution reached to 70.50%. All item communities (common factor variance) were above 0.6 except one item was 0.595. ANOVA showed that occupational accidents were associated with the safety climate score on total, danger judgment and safety control measure dimension (P < 0.05). There existed significant correlation between the safety climate total score and dimension scores (P < 0.01), the correlation coefficients were 0.700, 0.728, 0.705, 0.703, 0.354, 0.571 and 0.485 respectively. The safety climate scale total Cronbach's alpha coefficient, half-split Spearman-Brown coefficient, theta coefficient and omega coefficient indicated that the safety climate scale had good inter-item consistency among items.

Conclusion: The measurement of safety climate at workplace is developed. It has good reliability and valid.