Defining and Assessing Safety Culture in High Reliability Systems

Lee, T. (1998). Assessment of safety culture at a nuclear reprocessing plant. Work & Stress,
12(3), 217-237.
The development and validation of a survey at the Sellafield site of British Nuclear Fuels in
Cumbria was described in this article. The procedure was as follows: five focus groups were held
to elicit safety-relevant beliefs, attitudes and values. The first draft questionnaire was constructed
based on the transcript. The draft version was administered to all who had taken part and an open
meeting was held to discuss shortcomings and possible amendments. Administration of the
questionnaire to a pilot group and finally, the resulting 172-item questionnaire, a 7-point Likert
scale, which covered 9 safety domains: procedures, risks, job satisfaction, rules, participation,
training, control, and plant design. Each domain was analyzed using principal components
analysis, 38 factors were extracted, and the 19 accounting for the most variance were selected.
Factor scores were validated against the reported number of lost-time accidents. Sixteen out of
19 discriminated at high levels of significance. A generic analysis of the full questionnaire and
secondary factor analysis of the primary factors were also conducted, but showed no advantage.
A reduced version with 81 items resulting from the within-domain analysis performed as well as
the original, with considerable improvement in validity obtained by using discriminant function
coefficients to weight items in regression scores in place of factor loadings. Feedback was
provided for subgroups, based on gender, age, length of service, active area involvement,
days/shift, department, and type of work or job type. The application of the questionnaire in
measuring safety culture and the methods to address the weakness revealed by this safety survey
and improve the safety culture were discussed.
Luxhoj, J. T., & Arendt, D. N. (2001, draft). Application of systems engineering capability
maturity model (SE-CMM) to aviation organizational factors.
The Systems Engineering Capability Maturity Model (SE-CMM) is presented, which propose
that product quality directly results from people, process, and technology capabilities. This
model further divides capacity into six levels within an organization with respect to people,
process, and technology. The six capacity levels are not performed, performed informally,
planned and tracked, well-defined, quantitatively controlled, and continuously improved. This
paper presents a framework for extending the SE-CMM to aviation organizational factors. As an
example of systems engineering approaches, the Air Transportation Oversight System (ATOS)
was used to illustrate the possible application of the SE-CMM. According to ATOS, air carrier
operations are classified into seven systems. These seven systems are evaluated across six
systems safety attributes. By expanding the ATOS questions to allow differentiation into six
capability maturity levels across 6 systems safety attributes, deeper insights into interactions of
inspection elements and the corresponding strengths/weaknesses of air carriers’ processes may
be obtained, leading to more focused safety interventions.
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