Reliability and validity of Health and Safety Climate Survey / 环境与职业医学

ABSTRACT

Background The health and safety climate of workplace has an important impact on the physical and mental health of workers. There is no available scale for the evaluation of workplace health and safety climate in China at present. Objective This study aims to sinicize and evaluate the reliability and validity of the Health and Safety Climate Survey. Methods The English version of Health and Safety Climate Survey was translated to Chinese and back-translated to English, and followed by expert evaluation to develop a Chinese version. Quota sampling method was used to select 2600 employees from 16 enterprises and public institutions in Pudong New Area of Shanghai and to evaluate the reliability and validity of the Chinese version of the scale. Structural validity, convergent validity, and discriminant validity were included in validity evaluation. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were used to test structural validity. In EFA, an acceptable factor loading of items on their respective dimensions was > 0.60. In CFA, an acceptable root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA), a standard absolute fitness index, was < 0.05. Comparative fit index (CFI) and parsimony-adjusted non-normed fit index (PNFI), measures of incremental improvement and fit, > 0.90 indicated a good fit. Convergent validity was evaluated by average variance extracted (AVE), and an AVE > 0.50 indicated good convergent validity. Discriminant validity was determined as good by the square root of AVE greater than the correlation coefficient between latent variables. Cronbach’s α coefficient was used to evaluate the internal consistency of the scale; the internal consistency considered was very good with an α > 0.90. Cronbach’s α coefficient may cause underestimation of reliability in the case of error correlation. Therefore, composite reliability (CR) calculated based on structural equation model >0.70 indicated that the CR was good. Results The response rate was 95.69%. The Chinese version of Health and Safety Climate Survey included 22 items belonging to six dimensions which was extracted by the EFA, and the cumulative variance contribution rate was 74.79%. The corrected RMSEA was 0.045, the PNFI was 0.970, and the CFI was 0.975 in the CFA, indicating good fit. The dimensional AVE values were all greater than 0.50, indicating good CV. The square root of AVE was greater than the correlation coefficient between latent variables, indicating good DV. The Cronbach’s α was 0.90 for the total scale and were above 0.70 for all dimensions. The CR was 0.93 for the total scale and were above 0.70 for all dimensions, indicating that the overall reliability of the scale was good. Conclusion The Chinese version of Health and Safety Climate Survey has good reliability and validity, and can be further improved in field application.