Strategies for construction hazard recognition
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| CONCLUSION A critical component in safety risk management is to adequately identify hazards and mitigate its associated risk using safety program elements. Unfortunately, recent research has shown that the construction industry has performed poorly in this aspect. Although studies have revealed the inadequacy in hazard recognition within the industry (Carter and Smith, 2006), there has been minimal research in identifying efficient ways to make improvements. Inmost projects, due to limited availability of resources and time constraints (Vaziri et al., 2007), contractors are forced to select a subset of hazard recognition program elements for effective field implementation. However, little is known regarding the relative influence of available methods. As a result, contractors often choose safety and hazard recognition program elements based on their subjective intuition with little regard to relative effectiveness (Hallowell and Gambatese, 2009). In response to this gap in knowledge, this study identified and catalogued twenty one potential 31 site-based hazard recognition program elements from literature and an expert panel of safety professionals. Further, the most promising strategies were prioritized using ratings provided by the expert panel. Consensus analysis performed on the ratings obtained indicated the presence of reasonable agreement between the experts and that inferences could be made based on the mean ranks computed. Based on the analysis the ‘Pre-job safety meeting quality measurement tool emerged as being the most effective strategy to improve hazard recognition. Other studies in past literature have also emphasized the importance of quality safety meetings for improved hazard communication and awareness (Hallowell and Gambatese, 2009). This was followed by the augmented and interactive virtuality training environment. Such environments have been particularly shown to be beneficial for electrical safety training (Zhao et al., 2009) and other educational purposes (Hughes et al., 2005; Boud et al., 1999). The results of the study can be used by construction safety practitioners and construction managers to strategically identify potential hazard recognition programs to complement already existing methods. A primary limitation of the study is that the expert panel represented only professionals representing Construction Industry Institute (CII) member organizations. As a result, findings may not be generalizable or valid for the general industry due to constraints in resources, differences in management operations, safety culture, type of projects undertaken, etc. This is especially true given that the individual strategies were ranked based on the attributes identified by the panel members. However, several expert members have had broad experience on numerous projects allover the world for small, medium, and large companies and have undertaken safety roles on diverse projects in their past. In order to validate and verify generalizability of research findings, future empirical field- research studies will be undertaken in diverse projects to test the effects of the most promising 32 strategies (e.g. Pre-job safety meeting quality measurement tool) on hazard recognition. The research question will aim to test the proposed null hypothesis that the strategy does not improve the proportion of hazards identified and controlled before the start of construction. Also, questions regarding the cost of implementation and effectiveness of these strategies that could potentially become industry standard methods will be determined. Download 2.75 Mb. Share with your friends:
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