Measuring safety climate: identifying the common features

In UK industry, particularly in the energy sector, there has been a movement away from `lagging' measures of safety based on retrospective data, such as lost time accidents and incidents, towards `leading' or predictive assessments of the safety climate of the organisation or worksite. A number of di€erent instruments have been developed by industrial psychologists for this purpose, resulting in a proliferation of scales with distinct developmental histories. Reviewing the methods and results from a sample of industrial surveys, the thematic basis of 18 scales used to assess safety climate is examined. This suggests that the most typically assessed dimensions relate to management (72% of studies), the safety system (67%), and risk (67%), in addition themes relating to work pressure and competence appear in a third of the studies. # 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.