Physical and Psychosocial Safety Climate Scales: Psychometric Evidence and Invariance Measurement in a Portuguese Sample

Abstract

Accident prevention is one of the key rules for workplace safety, and the safety climate has been linked to the possibility of influencing not only the safety behavior of workers but also the occurrence of accidents. Thus, this study aims to present the psychometric evidence of the physical and psychosocial safety climate scales in a Portuguese sample. From a sample of 844 participants, 505 men and 339 women, aged between 17 and 68 years (M = 37.09, SD = 10.57), the results show that the one-factor solution yielded the best fit to the data with acceptable reliability in both scales. The invariance measure between professions was only observed in the psychosocial safety climate scale, thus alerting to the susceptibility to different professional populations of the physical safety climate scale. Understanding the safety climate is critical to reducing occupational disease, injuries and accidents, and further study should deepen the psychometric qualities of both scales.