The Relationship between Workers' Safety Attitudes and Their Beliefs in Destiny, Chance and the Rule of Control Measures in Prevention of Tunneling Accidents

Background: The implementation of HSE controlling programs are so complicated in tunneling industries which are considered as one of the hazardous industries. This study aims at investigating the relationship between employees' safety attitudes and status of their belief in destiny, chance and perceived importance of HSE programs in prevention of occupational accidents. Methods: This research is a cross-sectional and descriptive-analytical study on a contracting company specialized in tunneling, and investigates 760 subjects. A standard 25-item questionnaire is used to assess safety attitude and three researcher-made questions are utilized to evaluate the subjects' belief in destiny, chance and perceived importance of HSE programs in prevention of occupational accidents. The reliability and validity of these questionnaire are obtained by Cronbach's alpha test (α=0.76). All analyses are done at the significance level of 0.05 by the help of SPSS 16 software. Results: There is a significant statistical correlation between belief in chance in occurrence of occupational accidents with subjects' safety attitudes (P-value<0.05 and r=0.76), and also between belief in absolute destiny in occurrence of occupational accidents (P-value<0.05 and r=0.59). Furthermore, there is a significant direct correlation between status of acceptance and perceived importance of HSE programs in reducing the occupational accidents with subjects' safety attitudes (P-value<0.01 and r=0.51), and also between belief in chance in occurrence of occupational accidents (P-value<0.05 and r=0.68). Conclusion: The employees, who consider factors such as chance and destiny as the only reasons for occurrence of occupational accidents have less belief in importance of controlling measures in accidents prevention.