Validation of a pre-existing safety climate scale for the Turkish furniture manufacturing industry

Abstract

Understanding the safety climate level is essential to implement a proactive safety program. The objective of this study is to explore the possibility of having a safety climate scale for the Turkish furniture manufacturing industry since there has not been any scale available. The questionnaire recruited 783 subjects. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) tested a pre-existing safety scale's fit to the industry. The CFA indicated that the structures of the model present a non-satisfactory fit with the data (χ² = 2033.4, df = 314, p ≤ 0.001; root mean square error of approximation = 0.08, normed fit index = 0.65, Tucker–Lewis index = 0.65, comparative fit index = 0.69, parsimony goodness-of-fit index = 0.68). The results suggest that a new scale should be developed and validated to measure the safety climate level in the Turkish furniture manufacturing industry. Due to the hierarchical structure of organizations, future studies should consider a multilevel approach in their exploratory factor analyses while developing a new scale.

Keywords:

• safety climate
• safety culture
• furniture manufacturing industry
• safety management

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.