Association Between Fatigue And Safety Performance Of Construction Workers

Fatigue remains a critical factorthat causes occupational accidents andinjuries in construction industry. However, the association between constructionworkers’ fatigue and their safety performance has not been quantitativelyindicated, as a result, practical guidance is barely available for fatiguemanagement. By developing appropriate measures and conducting experiments,the present study sought to demonstrate the association between constructionworkers’ fatigue and their safety performance from a quantitative perspective.Firstly, a Fatigue Assessment Scale for Construction workers(FASCW) wasdeveloped in both English and Chineseversion in order to measure fatigue. Vialiterature review, focus group survey with research personnel and constructionworkers, the English scale was developed and then validated in a sample of USconstruction workers. Afterwards, by translation and focus group survey,theChinese scale was developed in a similar way. After testing in a sample ofChinese construction worker, the Chinese version scale was validated as well.Secondly, an experimental method was designed to measure the safetyperformance of construction workers. The manual handling task was selected asa typicalconstruction work task for experiment simulation. An apparatus wasthen built to simulate potential hazard and measure the result of hazard copingduringthemanual handling task. Safety performance was indicated by task error(i.e., failure to avoid simulated hazard).In addition, the experimental methodwas validated by means of pilot experiments andpost-experiment interviewswith20rebar workers.Finally, by using the above mentioned scale and experimental method, anexperiment with10rebar workers was conducted to quantitativelyanalyze theassociation between construction workers’fatigue and safety performance. Themajor results included:1) measured by the FASCW,fatigue caused noobviouschange on error ratewhen its score was within20and,significantlyincreasederror rate when its score was over20;2) during the initial stage offatigue effect, task errors were largely attributed to the failure of hazard perception; with fatigue further accumulated, more and more errors occur owingto the failure of motor control;3) most of the errors could be regarded as“unaware errors”(i.e., workers are not conscious of the errors); fatigue not onlyincreasedthe error rate, but also impaired workers’ ability in detecting theirerrors. Implications of the experiment results for fatigue management onconstruction sites were discussed accordingly.The present study has contributed to the existing body of knowledge inproviding an applicable scale to measure construction workers’ fatigueanddesigning an experimental method to measure construction workers’ safetyperformance. Moreover, by analyzing data collected from experiments, thepresent study hasdemonstrated the association between construction workers’fatigue and their safety performance from a quantitative perspective,enhancedthe understanding of the construction workers’fatigue and the theoretical basisfor fatigue mangement on construction sites.