Commercial fishers are employed in one of the most dangerous jobs in Canada.
Additionally, they tend both not to report work injuries and to deny and trivialize risks
their job entails.
This study focuses on fishers' subjective interpretation of their work environment.
Its purposes were to examine fishers' attributed causes of accidents and to derive
implications for prevention education. The researcher employed a qualitative
methodology and interviewed 12 professional fishers who worked on the British
Columbia coast. The interviews focused on fishers' descriptions of accidents and their
attributed causes. Attribution theory was operationalized to provide a conceptual
framework through which to analyze the 12 transcripts. The researcher transcribed the
interviews, then highlighted and analyzed excerpts depicting the fishers' attributed causes
of accidents. Three strategies were employed to examine the trustworthiness of the
researcher's judgements regarding the transcripts and final interpretation of the data. The
strategies were: use of a research partner (consistency), conducting a participant review
(credibility), and comparison with another study (triangulation).
The participants of this study attributed multiple causes to a given accident and
their explanations were complex. The study found 22 categories of causes of accidents.
The attributed causes from 9 of the 12 participants were distributed in all quadrants of
attributions on the orienting framework (external/stable, external/unstable, internal/stable
and internal/unstable). Five or more participants attributed the following as causes in
their accidents: Economic Pressures, Luck or Fate, Weather Conditions Expected,
Fatigue, and Stress. This study's results suggest that the techno-rational approach of
existing traditional training programs, that concentrate on causes located mainly in the
external/stable quadrant, does not concur with fishers' attributed causes of accidents.
The study indicates that prevention education program content should be
broadened to address the full spectrum of fishers' attributed causes of accidents. Through
the utilization of fishers' attributed causes of accidents, prevention education programs
could assist fishers to focus on their perceptions of occupational hazards and risks, and
address questions of past risk taking and future risk assessment. From these insights
fishers can review what can be done to control or eliminate a particular risk.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/9286 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Brandlmayr, Victoria Lee |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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