Safety is very important for our society. In contrast, it is hard to define what this term really means. Nevertheless, one area that is considered important for safety involves accident prevention. Many methods exist within this area which aims at preventing accidents from happening. One accident prevention method is called ‘The Safety Scanning Tool (SST)’. The study conducted in this thesis aimed at exploring whether the SST could improve the safety understanding of experts from the domain of aviation. The term ‘safety understanding’, as it is used in this thesis, refers to the understanding of central scientific concepts underlying safety. These concepts relate to the area of accident prevention and they were the results of a literature study on safety. Thus, the safety understanding was addressed on two levels of abstraction. The first general abstraction level concerned the basic assumptions for studying an organization’s safety culture relating to Schein’s (1992) framework cited by Guldenmund (2000). This relates to the area of accident prevention in a more general way. The second more specific abstraction level regarded 21 different safety issues important for accident prevention. These originated from the area of resilience engineering. Furthermore, this study was structured as a field experiment using a pre-post test and a within-group design. In order to measure the different experts’ safety understanding, the data were gathered with the help of two surveys before and after the experts’ used the SST. The SST was applied to two groups of experts. In the first group, they were six people, and, in the second 16. The questions in the surveys were created with the help of the above mentioned literature study on safety. The results were analyzed with the help of the statistics program SPSS. In addition, the results were analyzed with the help of sources from academic literature. These were used in order to determine whether there was an improvement of the safety understanding or not. Based on the results from this study, it can be concluded that undergoing the SST caused several improvements of the experts’ safety understanding. These improvements were found in both groups of experts and on both abstraction levels of the safety understanding. However, one result relating to the basic assumption level in the second group of experts could be interpreted both as an improvement and as a decrease of the safety understanding. The results of this study indicate not only that the SST has the ability to detect safety problems in an early state, before they can develop to the outcome of an accident. It has also the ability to enhance its user’s safety understanding relating to factors important for accident prevention.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-68733 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Larsson, Ann-Sofie |
| Publisher | Linköpings universitet, Institutionen för datavetenskap |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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