ASSESSMENT OF CONSTRUCTION WORKERS’ RISK PERCEPTION AND VISUAL ATTENTION TO IMPROVE SAFETY IN CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY
Open Access
- Author:
- Shams Amiri, Shideh
- Graduate Program:
- Architectural Engineering
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- July 10, 2017
- Committee Members:
- Somayeh Asadi, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
- Keywords:
- Eye tracking
Questionnaire
Risk
Construction hazard
Safety - Abstract:
- Recently, the construction industry has implemented different approaches to improve safety among construction workers, however; only a few of them have focused on human factors. The main objective of this study is to investigate the role of human factors on safe behavior of construction workers at the job site. The study is conducted through three-steps to analyze the relationship between worker’s safety visual attention and perception of risks and hazards. The three-step experiments include questionnaire, Balloon-Analogue-Risk-Task (BART), and eye tracking assessment. In the first step, the questionnaire is conducted to assess participants working experience and knowledge and psychologically measure their safety attitude and risk perception. In the second step, a BART test is conducted to measure risk taking behavior. The last step measures the construction workers’ visual attention using eye-tracking. Eye-tracking is widely accepted as the most direct and continuous measure of attention given that where one looks is highly correlated with where a person is focusing his/her attention on. In this project, the participants are selected from construction workers and managers from different companies as well as Architectural Engineering undergraduate and graduate students (Construction option) who have worked on construction projects. The results of the survey analysis reveal that experienced workers and those who have more children have a higher risk perception compared to the less experienced workers. In addition, descriptive statistics reveal that most of the workers are concerned to get injured at work. This could confirm that the construction workers positively perceive risks and hazards at the job site. Also, construction workers who are taking greater risks (based on the results of the BART experiment) have lower risk perception and, they would underestimate the level of danger however, those who are less risky have higher risk perception and they would overestimate the level of danger.