Developing an instrument to assess attitudes of agricultural employers and employees toward farm safety.

Reinhart-DD; Bean-TL; McCaslin-NL

J Agric Saf Health 1996 May; 2(2):27-34

http://dx.doi.org/10.13031/2013.19443

00230976

The steps used in developing a questionnaire for measuring the attitudes of agricultural workers toward farm safety were described. The questionnaire was developed as part of a NIOSH funded project for providing safety training to farm operators and their employees in Ohio. General farm safety, personal protective equipment, shielding and guarding of tractors and machinery, and the farm shop were identified for assessment. Content validity was assessed by a panel of experts who reduced the number of questions originally proposed from 84 to 40. The panel also suggested that separate scales be developed for employers and employees, and that a Likert scale be used to score each item. Readability was assessed by analyzing the proposed scales according to three readability tests and by testing the scales with a sixth grade class. Reliability was evaluated by measuring test/retest correlations and internal consistency. Test/retest correlations were measured using college students taking an agricultural safety course. Internal consistency was evaluated using three focus groups containing 25 farm operators and 28 farm employees. Test/retest reliability on the four scales on the employer questionnaire varied from 0.75 to 0.84 and from 0.70 to 0.76 on the employee questionnaire. Internal consistency scores on the employer and employee questionnaire varied from 0.39 to 0.72 and 0.59 to 0.74, respectively. An inter item correlational technique was applied to the internal consistency scores in which items on each scale were deleted until the largest coefficient, measured by the Cronbach alpha statistic (CA-statistic), was attained. This resulted in a final employer questionnaire containing 25 items and an employee instrument containing 24 items. The CA-statistic scores for the two instruments varied from 0.61 to 0.75 and 0.66 to 0.83, respectively.

NIOSH-Cooperative-Agreement; Agricultural-workers; Worker-motivation; Agricultural-industry; Questionnaires; Industrial-safety; Safety-programs; Accident-prevention; Safety-education; Author Keywords: Farm safety; Attitudes; Employers; Employees; Measurement instrument; Assessment

JASHFD

19960501

Journal Article

Cooperative Agreement

1996

Cooperative-Agreement-Number-U05-CCU-506070

2

1074-7583

Journal of Agricultural Safety and Health

OH