title: An item-response theory approach to safety climate measurement: The Liberty Mutual Safety Climate Short Scales.
abstract: Zohar and Luria's (2005) safety climate (SC) scale, measuring organization- and group- level SC each with 16 items, is widely used in research and practice. To improve the utility of the SC scale, we shortened the original full-length SC scales. Item response theory (IRT) analysis was conducted using a sample of 29,179 frontline workers from various industries. Based on graded response models, we shortened the original scales in two ways: (1) selecting items with above-average discriminating ability (i.e. offering more than 6.25% of the original total scale information), resulting in 8-item organization-level and 11-item group-level SC scales; and (2) selecting the most informative items that together retain at least 30% of original scale information, resulting in 4-item organization-level and 4-item group-level SC scales. All four shortened scales had acceptable reliability (≥0.89) and high correlations (≥0.95) with the original scale scores. The shortened scales will be valuable for academic research and practical survey implementation in improving occupational safety.
authors.affiliation: Liberty Mutual Research Institute for Safety, Hopkinton, MA, USA. Electronic address: Yueng-hsiang.Huang@Libertymutual.com.
authors.forename: Yueng-Hsiang
authors.initials: YH
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.affiliation: Liberty Mutual Research Institute for Safety, Hopkinton, MA, USA; Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, USA.
authors.forename: Jin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.affiliation: Liberty Mutual Research Institute for Safety, Hopkinton, MA, USA; University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA.
authors.forename: Zhuo
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Liberty Mutual Research Institute for Safety, Hopkinton, MA, USA; Portland State University, Portland, OR, USA.
authors.forename: MacKenna
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Perry
authors.affiliation: Liberty Mutual Research Institute for Safety, Hopkinton, MA, USA; Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, OR, USA.
authors.forename: Janelle H
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Cheung
authors.affiliation: University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA.
authors.forename: Mo
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Wang
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D007221:Industry / Q000458:organization & administration; D008297:Male; D016272:Occupational Health / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D015279:Organizational Culture; D011594:Psychometrics; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires / Q000592:standards*
keywords: Item response theory; Safety climate; Shortened scales