Does occupational injury research illuminate or obscure occupational safety?

The effectiveness of occupational injury research may, at least in part, depend upon the perspective used in that research.

This paper presents two perspectives occupational injury research may adopt - the injury-focused and the occupation-focused perspectives. The injury-focused perspective sees injuries as the primary unit of analysis in occupational injury research. It is based on several premises that focus its research on understanding occupational injuries. However, this focus may obscure certain factors of how injuries occur and, ultimately, how to create occupational safety. By contrast, the occupation-focused perspective sees work as the primary unit of analysis of occupational injury research. This perspective may allow researchers to solve what is described in this paper as the 'dark safety' problem (i.e., how even unsafe systems go long periods of time without failure). The paper does not argue that one or the other perspective should be the only perspective. However, a balanced perspective between injury-focused and occupation-focused research is needed to further occupational injury research.