Safety Culture Research in a Finnish Large-Scale Industrial Park

Abstract

Safety culture ontology has been constructed, consisting of 17 features and 51 statements. The statements specify an aspect of one or more features. Employees of the organisations estimate the truth-value of the statement in regard to their own organisation at that point in time. The employees also specify how they wish the situation represented by that statement to be in the future. Responses are collected via an Internet-based questionnaire. Ten different organisations were studied in the large-scale industrial park at Harjavalta, Finland. This research covers all the major companies within the area with 794 employees as potential respondents. We obtained 407 responses and the response rate was 51.3 %. From the responses, we have defined a collective understanding of each organisation’s safety culture. Together, the answers provide an insight into the state of the safety culture of the whole area. The safety cultures of the various organisations have also been compared with each other and with the culture of the industrial park as a whole.