Development of construction workers job stress scale to study and the relationship between job stress and safety behavior: An empirical study in Beijing

Abstract

Job stress is considered one of the critical causes of construction workers’ unsafe behaviors. As a mainstay industry in many countries, the construction industry has a considerable number of employees and the research on how job stress affects workers’ unsafe behaviors has important theoretical and practical significance to improve construction safety performance through better job stress management. In this study, the authors thoroughly reviewed the literature and conducted semi-structured interviews to identify the dimensions of job stress, designed the job stress scale and cited the safety behavior measurement scale. After that, a questionnaire survey was developed using the proposed measurement scale and distributed to the construction employees from a project in Beijing. One hundred fifty responses were collected and analyzed using reliability analysis to validate the scale’s internal consistency. Results from factor analysis indicate that the scales of job stress measurement can be grouped into six dimensions. To demonstrate the applicability of the developed scale on construction safety management research, the collected data was used to test the hypothesis that job stress has a negative correlation with safety behavior. Results show that the hypothesis is valid, and there is a negative correlation between job stress and safety behavior. In addition, finer results of the relationship between the six dimensions of job stress and safety behavior can be obtained. In summary, this study developed an improved stress scale for construction workers in China, and the proposed scale was validated by analyzing the data from an empirical study in Beijing.