Safety education and control: A tool to measure the safety locus of control

Effective safety education can prevent many occupational accidents. To -educate the public about safety effectively, determinants of safe behavior must be addressed. Personality constructs are among the most important determinants of safe behavior. One of the personality constructs that has been studied recently in relation to accidents is locus of control. The main aim of this study was designing, validating, and determining the reliability of safety locus of control scale.

This study was a descriptive, cross-sectional study. The "forward-backward" procedure was applied to translate safety locus of control scale (Jones and Becker 1985) from English to Persian. To determine the scientific validity of the scale, face validity and content validity by expert judgments were used. Internal consistency was determined using Cronbach's α-coefficient. Questionnaires were distributed to a group of 400 workers from different parts of Isfahan Steel Company. Finally, 317 workers completed the questionnaires. Exploratory factor analysis was performed with software SPSS13, and confirmatory factor analysis was performed with software LISREL8.8.

The exploratory factor analysis results revealed that the three components of the items can be extracted from the scale including internal control (4 questions), environmental and equipment control (4 questions), and chance and fate (4 questions). Confirmatory factor analysis using maximum likelihood estimation results indicated that the data had good fit with three-component scale and fit indices were acceptable: χ(2)/df=3.96, df=41, χ(2) =120.59, RMSIA=0.080, 95% Confidence Interval=0.64-0.097, CFI=0.96, GFI=0.94, AGFI=0.89. The internal control components and equipment and environmental control were negatively correlated with each other (P≤0.05, r=-0.41). Also, a weak correlation between chance and fate and environmental and equipment control was seen (P≤0.05, r=0.31).

In most studies, designing a scale and determining its validity and reliability is costly and time consuming. The available reliable and valid scale leads to reduced costs and accelerated research. In other words, duplication will be avoided. The scale obtained in this study can be used in safety and industrial psychology research.