Relative Importance of Constituting Factors of Safety Culture

As complex risk factors become routinized, social safety and safety culture are gaining attention as important social issues. Emphasis on safety culture reflects the fact that the need for social control over complex risk factors keeps increasing. It is difficult, however, to quantify safety culture as it has intangible and qualitative character-istics. Although it can be managed and improved with qualitative data, it can be managed and improved even more effectively when quantitative data are added. In the private security field, it is more important to understand safety culture as a profession which imple-ments safety-related tasks and manages safety. Even though Korea has undergone various incidents and acci-dents on a continual basis due to its compressed economic development, understanding and efforts on safety culture have been deficient owing to lack of awareness and non-systematic activities conducted by the private sector. This study found out assessment factors which constitute safety culture through DHP technique and drew out relative importance of the factors constituting the safety culture. As a result of the 1st Delphi analysis, a total of 73 factors of safety culture were drawn out and, through literature review on the preceding studies and meeting of the experts on researches, individual factors were finally classified into safety value, safety attitude, safety behavior and safety knowledge while organizational factors were classified into safety atmosphere, safety pro-cedure, safety education and safety motivation, totaling 73 factors. Based on the results of the 2nd Delphi, 6 factors with CVR values less than 1.0 and average less than 3.0, which were 1 item of safety attitude, 1 item of safety atmosphere, 2 items of safety procedure and 2 items of safety motive, were deleted, finalizing 67 items. In the 3rd AHP analysis, paired comparison was conducted on 67 factors and weights for each factor and their priority order were drawn out. Among the constituting factors of safety culture, safety value and safety motive had highest weights, followed in descending order by safety behavior, safety atmosphere, safety attitude, safety education, safety procedure and safety Knowledge. Although some factors among those which were studied and drawn out by this study are relatively insignifi-cant, even those factors need to be handled carefully as they also constitute safety culture. This study is expected to work as the basic data and to maintain a high level without compromising any one of the factors. In addition, subsequent studies by other researchers should prevent and prepare for various risks through integrated and long-term management of safety culture, not randomly and sporadically handled by industry, region and occu-pation. Studies on safety have been conducted through history and will also continue with the history of humanity. In the process of these studies, quantification of phenomena related to safety will work as a cornerstone for a higher level of research activities through measurement and comparison.