The Effectiveness Of The Safety Signs Empirical Study

With the rapid development of China's economy and the improvement of people's living standard,the needs for safety and health are increasing.But nowadays,the frequency of production accidents as well as their total numbers is increasing,which causes increasingly conspicuous contradiction between the needs for security and the present situation and decreases the stabilization and development of our societies. Therefore,how to actually improve the level of safety management and effectively prevent the occurrence of accidents becomes a social problem.Safety signs,which is generally regarded as an important measure dealing with safety production management,occupies an important position in safety management and is popularly applied to the safe production management all over the world.Although the application of safety signs is very common nowadays,the level or degree of their effectiveness has been limited by the lack of the design and application problems.In the past two decades,a lot of studies on the factors affecting the effectiveness of safety signs have been done by researchers in foreign countries,but few works,especially empirical study,referring to the situation in our country can be seen.Based on safety science theory,known research results,interviews of 13 corporations and questionnaires,the thesis studies the factors affecting the effectiveness of safety signs with empirical data.The conception of safety signs effectiveness is conducted by perceived risk level and compliance behavior under specific scene.On this foundation,two special subjects are constructed as follows:the first one is the influence of safe sign's character on its effectiveness,the second is the influence of individual characteristics,situational factors and safety climate.Four levels including 18 influencing factors are investigated respectively as well as their interaction.These are the character of safety signs(red,yellow,blue;prohibition, caution,must;circle-slash,triangle,circle),individual characteristics(risk propensity, safety-work self-efficacy,safety motivation,safety knowledge and safety skills), situational factors(familiarity degree,risk perception,compliance cost) and safety climate.There are two stages in this empirical research.The first stage is explorative,in which the validity and reliability are analyzed to conduct the variants.The final questionnaire is constructed on this basis.In the second stage,327 recycled effective questionnaires are analyzed by correlation analysis,variance analysis,general regression analysis and hierarchy regression analysis based on the reliability and validity of measurement models.The following results are shown in the first special subject:"red,yellow and blue" or "prohibition,caution and must" can represent three different risk levels respectively. But "circle-slash,triangle,and circle" can only represent two risk levels.Anyone of the 9 combinations consisted by two elements from colour,signal word and shape is more effective than the single factor it contains.The risk levels transferred have relation with its constituent elements.The second special subject shows that safety motivation,safety knowledge and safety skills are mediator variables of compliance behavior.The results also show that safety climate has the most effective direct influence on the compliance behavior; safety-work self-efficacy,safety motive,safety knowledge and safety skills,risk perception and compliance cost have significant influence on the compliance behavior, too;risk propensity and familiar degree have no significant influence on compliance behavior.Analyzed from the own characteristics of safety signs,individual characteristics, situation factors and safety climate,the thesis studies the factors influencing the effectiveness of safety signs empirically.It would give contributions to managers of enterprises,designers of safety signs and policies.The limitation of this paper as well as the study prosperity is discussed.There are still many problems deserving further studying,such as research samples,the extension of research ranges,font size and social influence and so on.The contribution or innovation of this research may be:1.Broadening the study on the influence of safety signs variables on its effectiveness.Based on the research of single factor,this thesis studies the risk level of the signal words prohibition,caution,and must,as well as the color of red,yellow and blue. Moreover,the risk levels of circle-slash,triangle and circle are compared which were not studied before.It is found that the signal words,prohibition,caution,and must represent three different risk levels,but the shapes,circle-slash,triangle and circle represent two kinds of risk level only.This thesis discusses the interaction of colors and signal words,signal words and shapes.Based on this result,the interactions of colors and shapes are studied innovately.It is found that the risk level reflected by the nine combinations of colors and shapes has main effect.Furthermore,the risk level is not only related to the color, but also to the shape.It is proposed that the effectiveness of safety signs is reduced due to the fewer safety signs,but these findings broaden the amounts of safety signs and offere the routes to this problem.2.The thesis explores the effect of the variable safety-work self-efficacy on safety signs,which was not discussed before.This thesis defines the concept of safety-work self-efficacy,constructs the scale of safety-work self-efficacy,and proves its effect on the compliance behavior.The results suggest that the employees may be able to obey the safety signs if they have better safety-work self-efficacy.From these results,evaluation and improvement of the judgment of employees' confidence on safety work should be an important content of safety management.Not only the skill but also the safety-work self-efficiency of employees should be improved in the enterprises.3.This thesis introduces the research of safety climate into the area of safety signs. Furthermore,the empirical work proof the mediator effect of safety skills between the safety climate and the effectiveness of safety signs.Empirical Study indicated that safety motivation,safety knowledge and safety skills were the mediator variables of safety climate and the effectiveness of safety signs,safety climate has the direct effect on the compliance behavior,and the research further completes the theoretical model of factors affecting effectiveness of safety signs.These results showed that the organization should put more emphasizes on the improvement of safety climate as well as the safety motivation,safety knowledge and safety skills,so as to enhance the employees' compliance behaviors.4.The previous researchers pay more attention to the effect of single variable on the effectiveness of safety signs,this research gets some different conclusions in the multi-variables context through the empirical tests.This result is a novel contribution to this area.It is found that familiarity doesn't influence the compliance behavior under the effect of risk perceive and compliance costs through empirical study.Risk propensity is a distinct influence variable in the effect of individual characteristics.However,risk propensity becomes less distinct in the effect of safety climate and situation factors. This indicats that risk perception of employees to workplace should be enhanced, compliance costs should be reduced as well as the safety climate should be improved.5.Some measurement indicators have been designed in this research,such as safety-work self-efficacy,and safety skills.Although these indicators should be improved and the validity of them should be tested repeatedly,they might provide some reference and basis for relevant research in the future.