Annotated Bibliography Essay
kcruvtvz
understanding_industrial_unit_3.pdf
Understanding industrial safety signs: implications for
occupational safety management K.L. Chan and Alan H.S. Chan
Department of Manufacturing Engineering and Engineering Management, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the understanding of industrial safety signs and messages by registered and non-registered safety officers in Hong Kong with ten different user factors, and to examine the relationship between cognitive sign features and sign comprehensibility.
Design/methodology/approach – The research methodology includes the survey development and appropriate statistical analyses. In total, 92 Hong Kong Chinese participated voluntarily in the study. A questionnaire survey was used to collect information about demographics, personal experience on safety and health issues, experience of reviewing safety sign information, comprehension scores, and the ratings of sign features for 30 industrial safety signs used in Hong Kong. The effect of ten user factors on sign understanding for the design of highly usable safety signs was examined.
Findings – Of the ten factors tested, only the factor of possession of registered safety officer (RSO) status was a significant predictor of comprehension performance. As expected, comprehension scores varied with the cognitive sign features of familiarity, concreteness, simplicity, and meaningfulness.
Research limitations/implications – The currently used industrial safety signs should be redesigned as soon as possible, with careful consideration of cognitive sign features. To make the results more generally applicable, further research is needed to collect more data, particularly from females.
Practical implications – This research suggests that an effective education program for promoting the intended messages of industrial safety signs in various industries and work environments should be conducted as soon as possible. Safety officers, especially those who work in the construction industry need to play a more prominent role in ensuring workplace safety, and in transferring safety knowledge to the workers.
Social implications – There is a need to enhance RSOs’ risk perception and to increase awareness of the importance of safety signs through training programs, so as to improve workplace safety and organizational safety culture. The redesigned safety signs need to be launched with a public education program.
Originality/value – The paper’s findings emphasize the need to create awareness of the importance of industrial safety and promote understanding of safety sign meanings amongst people in their work environments. Useful information for the design and use of safety signs was generated.
Keywords China, Occupational health and safety, Health and safety requirements, Work safety, Industrial safety signs, Safety officers, Cognitive sign features, Hong Kong
Paper type Research paper
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0263-5577.htm
The work described in this paper was fully supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. CityU 110508). Thanks are extended to Gullane Limited for provision of safety sign stimuli and P.Y. Fan for her help in the data collection process of the study.
Understanding industrial
safety signs
1481
Received 14 February 2011 Revised 7 June 2011
Accepted 8 June 2011
Industrial Management & Data Systems
Vol. 111 No. 9, 2011 pp. 1481-1510
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0263-5577
DOI 10.1108/02635571111182809
1. Introduction There has been a growing concern about industrial safety in Hong Kong in recent years, and this concern has manifested itself in a variety of ways. Local laws require that industrial undertakings now have additional responsibilities for industrial safety; they must strengthen the supervision and administration of production safety, and take a more active role in preventing and reducing accidents. Regulations and guidelines have been promulgated for industrial undertakings and professional institutions with the aim of improving occupational health and safety. More industrial concerns have been required to identify and assess potential risks to eliminate unacceptable risks and increase productivity (Law et al., 2006; Gabbar, 2007; Liu et al., 2007; Edington and Schultz, 2008; Goetzel et al., 2008). However, there are still many industrial accidents causing serious injuries and deaths. It was reported by the Hong Kong Labour Department (2010) that the number of occupational injuries in all workplaces in the first three quarters of 2010 stood at 31,580, representing an increase of 6.7 percent from 29,601 in the same period of 2009. The number of fatalities in the first three quarters of 2009 and 2010 were 129 and 143, respectively, representing an increase of 10.9 percent. Compared with neighbouring countries, the reported injury rates in Hong Kong are relatively higher. The annualized fatal injury rates per 100,000 employees for 2007 and 2008 for Hong Kong were 6.6 and 6.8, respectively (International Labour Organization, 2011). For Korea, the corresponding values were 0.04 and 0.05, respectively. For Japan, the corresponding values were even lower at 0.01 and 0.00, respectively.
A recent investigation of fatal construction accidents showed that “poor safety attitudes and behaviour of workers” was the main cause of industrial fatalities (Wong et al., 2009). The design of the workplace environment is another obvious possible cause of accidents and its importance was highlighted by Golding and Golding (1987). However, according to Whittingham (2004), about 80 percent of accidents can be attributed to human error. People make mistakes for a number of different reasons, in particular when there is a lack of awareness or understanding of safety information provided in the workplace (Sneddon et al., 2004; Laurence, 2005).
Hebblewhite (2009) indicated the importance of safety signage and pointed out that in mine safety management systems, signage is one of the system components used for delivering warning and guidance messages to mining workers so as to promote appropriate and responsible behaviour in mine areas. It is important that “the industrial designer should make a sign as clear and unequivocal as possible so that the target group understand the message” ( Mono, 1997). Recent studies on safety signs, however, have shown that some safety signs do not convey safety messages at all effectively (Liu et al., 2005). Failure to achieve adequate understanding and to convey warning information effectively can lead to injury or death (Lesch, 2003). Therefore, to reduce the risk of misunderstanding and increase the level of sign comprehension, there is a need to investigate the effects of user factors on sign understanding and to design safety signs with a high level of usability. The study of industrial safety sign comprehensibility is thus of great importance because at present there are no local codes, regulations, or standards governing the design and use of such signs. It is of course, of interest to study general understanding of safety signs by the people working in different industrial environments. However, here, the authors considered that this study should be conducted using safety officers because they are safety professionals with safety work experience in various industries and work environments. As safety professionals,
IMDS 111,9
1482
the safety officers should be familiar with general industrial safety and health matters, and have reasonable knowledge and understanding of the intended meanings of safety signs.
Specifically, this study investigated the understanding of industrial safety signs and messages by registered and non-registered safety officers (NRSOs) in Hong Kong with ten different user factors, and examined the relationship between cognitive sign features and sign comprehensibility. A comprehensive review of the purposes and use of safety signs, job duties of registered and non-registered safety offices, user factors, and definitions of cognitive sign features was conducted for formulating the research questions of the study. For investigation of the understanding of industrial safety signs by safety officers, a questionnaire survey was conducted with careful selection of safety signs for comprehension testing. Participants were asked about their demographics and experience of reviewing safety sign information, and for rating the cognitive sign features and testing safety sign comprehension. The comprehension scores of safety signs and comprehension performance of participants were carefully analysed, and the interrelationships between cognitive features and comprehension scores for the signs were examined. The association between personal experience on safety and health issues and comprehension performance for the participants was also studied. The findings of this study will provide useful information for the design and selection of safety signs and give suggestions of the necessity of sign training and test process for obtaining registration status, which are important for promoting the intended messages of industrial safety signs so as to improve workplace safety and organizational safety culture.
This manuscript is structured as follows: in Section 2, we review literature on different aspects of the research topic including industrial safety signs, safety officers, user factors, and cognitive sign features. In section 3, we formulate the research expectations based on the review results of past-related factors. In Section 4, research methodology is presented, and is followed by experimental results in Section 5. A thorough discussion of the major findings, research implications, and limitations is given in Section 6. Section 7 gives our conclusions with suggestions for further research.
2. Literature review 2.1 Safety signs A very great advantage of icon-based interfaces for industrial workers is the potential to convey messages free from the constraints of language. Signs and icons can also be used to convey information to people who cannot read printed messages because of vision problems, low-level verbal skills, or inadequate knowledge of the language used in the warning. However, in practice, such icon-based graphical signs may not always be effective and it has been suggested that poorly designed symbols can lead to injury due to the lack of understanding or misinterpretation (Raskin, 2000).
Currently, there is no general legislative requirement for providing occupational health and safety training to workers in Hong Kong, so some operators may have never received any safety training on the use of safety signs in their work environments. Therefore, it is very important that safety signs are well designed and understood to alert both trained and untrained people about possible hazards and to provide clear instructions on how to minimize or completely eliminate accidents and dangerous conditions.
For evaluation of sign and symbol design and comprehensibility, the American National Standard Institute (ANSI Z535.3, 2002) and the Organization for International
Understanding industrial
safety signs
1483
Standardization (ISO 3864-3, 2006) recommend that to be considered acceptable, signs and symbols must meet the criterion of at least 85 and 67 percent correct, respectively, in a comprehension test. However, results from past studies have indicated that there are substantial problems in the usability of safety signs and that the effectiveness of some safety signs is low in terms of conveying safety messages (Hancock et al., 2004; Liu et al., 2005; Tam et al., 2003). In a study on safety symbol comprehension done by Hancock et al. (2004), the comprehension rates for the two age groups of participants were lower than the 85 percent level recommended by the ANSI. Liu et al. (2005) evaluated 16 safety-related symbols used on intensive care unit devices in Germany and China, and found that only eight symbols used in Germany and four used in China reached a comprehension score higher than the 67 percent acceptance criterion of ISO 3864-3. In both Germany and China, only three symbols reached the 85 percent criterion specified by ANSI Z535.3. It has been reported that for safety sign perception, workers and supervisors were unable to correctly interpret four of the most common warning signs used for hazard identification, despite having been trained in their use (Smith-Jackson and Essuman-Johnson, 2002). Tam et al. (2003) investigated safety sign comprehension level for construction personnel working on construction sites in Hong Kong. They found that substantial problems existed with the comprehension of the signs and symbols that were posted around the construction sites, and highlighted the urgent need for further study of the comprehensibility of Hong Kong industrial safety signs. However, since that study was published, there have been no further studies addressing the issue of the comprehensibility of industrial safety signs by workers or safety professionals in Hong Kong.
2.2 Registered and non-registered safety officers In 2009, there were 2,338 people on the Register of Safety Officers in Hong Kong (Hong Kong Labour Department, 2009a) and they are generally known as registered safety officers (RSOs). To be considered qualified as a RSO in Hong Kong, a person should be employed as a full-time safety officer in an industrial undertaking and have an approved and proven record in education, training, professional experience and skill in industrial safety (FIU Regulations, 2002). A person who is qualified as an RSO should have at least a recognized certificate in occupational safety and health, or construction safety, and relevant experience of not less than one year. The duties of an RSO are to assist the proprietor of the industrial undertaking in promoting the safety and health of employees including the provision of advice on the implementation of safety management system, inspection, report preparation, accident investigations, safety promotion, etc. The number of people performing similar duties but not yet registered is far more than the number of RSOs. These NRSOs are generally in positions such as assistant safety officers, safety advisors, safety consultants, safety managers, etc. and often take care of safety issues at workplaces.
2.3 User factors It has been reported that personal factors such as age (Hancock et al., 2004), cultural background (Leung and Hellier, 1998), drinking habit, involvement in on-site safety promotion activities and job position (Tam et al., 2003) have all affected sign comprehension performance. Rousseau et al. (1998) showed that age-related differences in perceptual and cognitive abilities could influence the ability of older individuals
IMDS 111,9
1484
to perceive and process warning information. Previous studies on icon and pictogram comprehension have shown that people with a low level of literacy performed relatively poorly compared to those with high literacy (Dowse and Ehlers, 2003, 2004; Ng and Chan, 2008). It has been shown that the context, for example photographs of potential locations where the signs might be viewed, increased symbol comprehension (Wolff and Wogalter, 1998). Subjects with the relevant workplace or site visit experiences were usually more familiar with the context for safety signs and thus performed better in sign comprehension. Though it is worth noting that according to Jordan (1998), there will be some decrement in performance after a user has not performed a particular task with a product for a comparatively long period of time. Therefore, the positive effect of experience may be expected to diminish with time if the experience is not repeated.
2.4 Cognitive sign features Apart from the self-evident visual features of sign colour and surround shapes (Arend et al., 1987; Yu et al., 2004), safety researchers have proposed that cognitive sign features like familiarity, concreteness, complexity, and meaningfulness may also be important for the consideration in sign and icon design and understanding (McDougall et al., 1999; Chan and Ng, 2010a, b). Familiarity is the frequency with which signs have been encountered. Signs are concrete if they depict objects which have obvious connections with the real world while abstract signs do not. Signs are regarded as complex if they contain a lot of detail or are intricate, and simple if they only contain few elements or little detail. Meaningfulness refers, rather obviously, to how meaningful people perceive signs to be. It is obvious that the success of effective sign message communication does not only relate to user factors but also to the cognitive sign features. Thus, the interrelationships between the ratings of cognitive sign feature and comprehension performance of participants were examined in this study.
3. Theoretical foundation for development of research expectations 3.1 Registered and non-registered safety officers Given the differences in education, training, professional experience and skill in industrial safety between the registered and non-registered safety officers, it seems reasonable to expect that RSOs should understand safety signs better than NRSOs. If RSOs are unable to interpret the meanings of safety signs successfully, it should surely be more difficult for NRSOs and the general public to interpret such signs correctly. If this is a case, the results here should provide an alarm call for governments and safety management personnel to aim to improve the comprehensibility of existing safety signs in order to more effectively alert workers and the general public to hazards. For example, this can be done by designing and adopting a carefully selected set of standard safety symbols and then testing the symbol comprehension abilities for all workers as a necessary job requirement. Work organizations and employers should also pay more attention to and put more effort into promoting a safe work environment in advanced safety and health management systems by increasing worker awareness of safety warning signals (Nuñez and Villanueva, 2011; Zwetsloot et al., 2010). In this study, the comprehension levels of industrial safety signs for registered and non-registered safety officers in Hong Kong were examined and compared.
Understanding industrial
safety signs
1485
3.2 User factors In this study, the ten user factors chosen for study were: age, education level, industrial sector, possession of RSO status, years with RSO status, years of active safety work experience since registering as a safety officer, frequency of reviewing safety sign information, time since last review of safety sign information in Hong Kong, non-local experience of reviewing safety sign information, and time since last review of safety sign information outside Hong Kong. The last four factors in general indicated the experience that the participants may have of reviewing safety sign information. The term “review safety sign information” asked about the experience of seeing a safety sign and its meaning at the same time. The age factor was chosen because age-related differences in perceptual and cognitive abilities was shown to influence the ability of older individuals to perceive and process warning information (Rousseau et al., 1998), it was thus expected that younger participants would have better comprehension performance than older participants in this study. With regard to education level, it was expected that participants with a higher education level would perform better than those without such an education as previous studies have shown that people with a low level of literacy performed relatively poorly compared to those with high literacy on icon and pictogram comprehension (Dowse and Ehlers, 2003, 2004; Ng and Chan, 2008). For the industrial sector factor, it was hypothesized that safety officers who worked on construction sites would have more highly developed risk perception and be able to more easily recall sign meanings. Since experienced RSOs would have more experience on safety and health issues, this might help them to elicit the sign meaning more easily, it was thus expected that participants’ comprehension performance should increase with the number of years since obtaining registered officer status. Because some RSOs may work in other, non-safety related, fields after they obtained registration status, their active safety work experience needs also to be considered. As discussed above, there will be some decrement in performance after a user has not performed a particular task for a comparatively long period of time ( Jordan, 1998), it was therefore expected that sign comprehension performance would decrease with the increase in the period of not reviewing safety sign information and that the comprehension level of safety signs would be directly proportional to the frequency of reviewing safety sign information. Since safety signs are not globally standardized, there may be cultural elements in the safety signs used in difference countries, it was thus expected that experience of reviewing safety sign information outside Hong Kong would not help the participants comprehend the local symbols better.
3.3 Cognitive sign features Although there were studies to investigate the effects of cognitive sign features on the comprehensibility of traffic sign (Ng and Chan, 2007a, b, 2008), systematic study on the relationship, if any, between industrial safety signs understandability and the sign features amongst the safety personnel have not been undertaken. The four cognitive sign features of familiarity, concreteness, simplicity, and meaningfulness; and their relationships with industrial safety sign comprehension were examined in this study. It was expected that participants would comprehend the industrial safety signs better if the signs were familiar to them. As concrete signs provide a direct visualization aid in helping participants to elicit the meaning, they were expected to yield higher comprehension scores than abstract ones. Extraneous decorative parts on signs may
IMDS 111,9
1486
confound the meaning of the signs (Bruyas et al., 1998), so it was hypothesized that simple signs would be easier to comprehend than complex ones. The meaningfulness of a stimulus depends on its associated imagery and refers to the ability with which a stimulus can elicit a meaning in one’s mind (Preece et al., 1994). Hence, better comprehensibility was expected for meaningful signs. In summary, comprehension level was expected to be higher for familiar, concrete, simple, and meaningful signs. It was expected that the results of this study might reveal the necessity to promote understanding of safety sign meanings amongst people in their work environments and provide useful information and recommendations for the safety management to better design and select more easily comprehended industrial safety signs.
4. Methodology In order to investigate understanding of industrial safety signs by safety officers, the safety signs to be tested had to be carefully selected and the questionnaire well constructed for easy interpretation by the participants.
4.1 Safety signs Two criteria were set for the choice of industrial safety signs for study: first, their messages had to be conveyed by symbols only without the use of text; second, they were not used in conjunction with other safety signs for transmitting a message. A total of 30 commonly used Hong Kong industrial safety signs satisfying these two criteria were randomly selected (Table I). The signs were in four categories, namely; prohibition, warning, mandatory and guide (Table I) and were each (2.5 £ 2.5 cm) displayed on paper.
4.2 The questionnaire A self-administered questionnaire in Chinese was designed to gather information about participants’ personal particulars, ratings on cognitive sign features, and sign comprehension performance. The first part of the questionnaire asked about participants’ demographics, personal experience on safety and health issues, and experience of reviewing safety sign information. The second part was for rating the cognitive sign features and testing safety sign comprehension. Participants were asked to give subjective ratings between 0 to 100 points for familiarity (0 – very unfamiliar, 100 – very familiar), concreteness (0 – definitely abstract, 100 – definitely concrete), simplicity (0 – very complex, 100 – very simple), and meaningfulness (0 – completely meaningless, 100 – completely meaningful) for the safety signs. The questions and distractors were designed after considering the comments of a group of experienced safety and health professionals with a number of repeated trial runs. Taking sign M5 as an example, the four verbal labels were “wear safety belt at height”, “wear full body harness”, “wear protective clothes”, and “take adequate safety precautions”. The correct answer should be “wear safety belt at height”, the partially correct answer was “take adequate safety precautions”, and the incorrect answers were “wear full body harness” and “wear protective clothes”. A score of 0, 1, 2 mark was given for incorrect, partially correct, and correct response, respectively, for each question.
4.3 Pilot testing and assessing validity Before distribution of the questionnaire to the participants, a pilot test was conducted to estimate questionnaire completion time and to find out whether the questions
Understanding industrial
safety signs
1487
C o m
p re
h en
si o n
sc o re
(% )
R eg
is te
re d
sa fe
ty o ffi
ce rs
N o n
- re
g is
te re
d sa
fe ty
o ffi
ce rs
A ll
p a rt
ic ip
a n
ts C
a te
g o ry
S ig
n S
ig n
m ea
n in
g M
ea n
S D
M ea
n S
D M
ea n
S D
P ro
h ib
it io
n P
1 N
o th
o ro
u g
h fa
re 8 1 .7
1 2 6 .8
2 6 3 .7
3 3 1 .7
5 7 1 .7
4 3 0 .8
3
P 2
D o
n o t
u se
m o b
il e
p h
o n
e 8 2 .9
3 2 6 .4
8 7 6 .4
7 3 0 .5
8 7 9 .3
5 2 8 .8
5
P 3
N o t
su it
a b
le fo
r d
ri n
k in
g 3 5 .3
7 2 5 .6
0 3 7 .2
5 2 6 .1
6 3 6 .4
1 2 5 .7
9
P 4
D o
n o t
to u
ch 5 1 .2
2 5 0 .6
1 5 2 .9
4 5 0 .4
1 5 2 .1
7 5 0 .2
3
P 5
D o
n o t
o p
er a te
4 3 .9
0 2 9 .9
9 4 8 .0
4 2 8 .2
1 4 6 .2
0 2 8 .9
3
P 6
N o
p la
y in
g 3 7 .8
0 3 1 .1
9 3 7 .2
5 3 4 .4
1 3 7 .5
0 3 2 .8
4
O v
er a ll
5 5 .4
9 2 1 .5
0 5 2 .6
1 1 5 .4
0 5 3 .8
9 1 7 .9
0
(c o n ti
n u ed
)
Table I. The mean and standard deviation of comprehension score for each safety sign in this study
IMDS 111,9
1488
C o m
p re
h en
si o n
sc o re
(% )
R eg
is te
re d
sa fe
ty o ffi
ce rs
N o n
- re
g is
te re
d sa
fe ty
o ffi
ce rs
A ll
p a rt
ic ip
a n
ts C
a te
g o ry
S ig
n S
ig n
m ea
n in
g M
ea n
S D
M ea
n S
D M
ea n
S D
W a rn
in g
W 1
C a u
ti o n
s w
it h
co m
p re
ss ed
g a s
6 2 .2
0 2 9 .1
1 4 8 .0
4 3 8 .6
8 5 4 .3
5 3 5 .2
8
W 2
D a n
g er
! H
a rm
fu l
4 6 .3
4 5 0 .4
9 3 9 .2
2 4 9 .3
1 4 2 .3
9 4 9 .6
9
W 3
C a u
ti o n
! L
if ti
n g
in p
ro g
re ss
o v
er h
ea d
8 6 .5
9 2 5 .0
6 8 2 .3
5 3 2 .9
0 8 4 .2
4 2 9 .5
8
W 4
C a u
ti o n
! M
o v
in g
p a rt
ca n
cr u
sh a n
d cu
t 4 8 .7
8 2 8 .4
8 4 3 .1
4 3 7 .4
4 4 5 .6
5 3 3 .6
9
W 5
C a u
ti o n
! M
o v
in g
m a ch
in e
ca n
cr u
sh h
a n
d 7 6 .8
3 2 7 .6
1 6 8 .6
3 2 6 .3
8 7 2 .2
8 2 7 .1
0
W 6
C a u
ti o n
! B
el t
d ri
v e
h a n
d a b
ra si
o n
2 6 .8
3 4 4 .8
6 2 1 .5
7 4 1 .5
4 2 3 .9
1 4 2 .8
9
W 7
M in
d y
o u
r h
a n
d s
7 3 .1
7 4 4 .8
6 6 9 .6
1 4 5 .9
1 7 1 .2
0 4 5 .2
3
(c o n ti
n u ed
)
Table I.
Understanding industrial
safety signs
1489
C o m
p re
h en
si o n
sc o re
(% )
R eg
is te
re d
sa fe
ty o ffi
ce rs
N o n
- re
g is
te re
d sa
fe ty
o ffi
ce rs
A ll
p a rt
ic ip
a n
ts C
a te
g o ry
S ig
n S
ig n
m ea
n in
g M
ea n
S D
M ea
n S
D M
ea n
S D
W 8
C a u
ti o n
! S
li p
p er
y su
rf a ce
6 8 .2
9 4 7 .1
1 2 5 .4
9 4 4 .0
1 4 4 .5
7 4 9 .9
8
W 9
C a u
ti o n
! S
h a p
e p
o in
t cu
tt in
g fi
n g
er s
4 3 .9
0 3 7 .4
1 5 0 .0
0 3 7 .4
2 4 7 .2
8 3 7 .3
3
W 1 0
R is
k o f
ch em
ic a l
re a ct
io n
4 5 .1
2 3 6 .7
5 3 6 .2
7 3 3 .2
8 4 0 .2
2 3 4 .9
6
W 1 1
A tt
en ti
o n
! H
o t
b lo
w in
g 6 0 .9
8 4 4 .0
3 6 2 .7
5 4 6 .7
4 6 1 .9
6 4 5 .3
1
W 1 2
C h
a in
a ll
cy li
n d
er s
5 3 .6
6 5 0 .4
9 4 5 .1
0 5 0 .2
5 4 8 .9
1 5 0 .2
6
W 1 3
S u
d d
en d
ro p
4 6 .3
4 2 3 .4
3 3 8 .2
4 2 3 .6
4 4 1 .8
5 2 3 .7
6
W 1 4
D o
n o t
o p
er a te
w it
h o u
t g
u a rd
3 9 .0
2 2 6 .2
5 3 4 .3
1 3 0 .8
1 3 6 .4
1 2 8 .8
1
(c o n ti
n u ed
)
Table I.
IMDS 111,9
1490
C o m
p re
h en
si o n
sc o re
(% )
R eg
is te
re d
sa fe
ty o ffi
ce rs
N o n
- re
g is
te re
d sa
fe ty
o ffi
ce rs
A ll
p a rt
ic ip
a n
ts C
a te
g o ry
S ig
n S
ig n
m ea
n in
g M
ea n
S D
M ea
n S
D M
ea n
S D
W 1 5
D a n
g er
! R
o ta
ti n
g p
a rt
s, k
ee p
g u
a rd
cl o se
d 2 9 .2
7 3 3 .5
0 3 7 .2
5 4 5 .6
5 3 3 .7
0 4 0 .6
7
W 1 6
W o rk
in p
ro g
re ss
2 9 .2
7 4 6 .0
6 3 7 .2
5 4 8 .8
3 3 3 .7
0 4 7 .5
3
O v
er a ll
5 2 .2
9 1 7 .7
7 4 6 .2
0 1 6 .7
5 4 8 .9
1 1 6 .2
0
M a n
d a to
ry M
1 W
ea r
fa ce
sh ie
ld 1 0 0
– 8 5 .2
9 4 5 .0
5 9 1 .8
5 3 4 .1
9
M 2
W ea
r w
el d
in g
m a sk
9 3 .9
0 1 6 .5
6 8 7 .2
5 2 6 .1
6 9 0 .2
2 2 2 .5
3
M 3
U se
a d
eq u
a te
g u
a rd
in g
9 8 .7
8 7 .8
1 8 6 .2
7 2 6 .6
1 9 1 .8
5 2 1 .3
3
M 4
W ea
r p
ro p
er cl
o th
es 5 6 .1
0 5 0 .2
4 4 3 .1
4 5 0 .0
2 4 8 .9
1 5 0 .2
6
(c o n ti
n u ed
)
Table I.
Understanding industrial
safety signs
1491
C o m
p re
h en
si o n
sc o re
(% )
R eg
is te
re d
sa fe
ty o ffi
ce rs
N o n
- re
g is
te re
d sa
fe ty
o ffi
ce rs
A ll
p a rt
ic ip
a n
ts C
a te
g o ry
S ig
n S
ig n
m ea
n in
g M
ea n
S D
M ea
n S
D M
ea n
S D
M 5
W ea
r sa
fe ty
b el
t a t
h ei
g h
t 7 5 .6
1 2 5 .3
0 7 4 .5
1 2 7 .1
5 7 5 .0
0 2 6 .2
1
M 6
L o ck
th e
w h
ee ls
a ft
er fi
x ed
in p
o si
ti o n
6 7 .0
7 4 2 .7
3 5 7 .8
4 4 1 .6
8 6 1 .9
6 4 2 .1
7
M 7
K ee
p lo
ck ed
9 2 .6
8 2 6 .3
7 8 8 .2
4 3 0 .9
6 9 0 .2
2 2 8 .9
4
O v
er a ll
8 3 .4
5 1 7 .2
3 7 4 .6
5 1 7 .6
4 7 8 .5
7 1 7 .2
8
G u
id e
G 1
E m
er g
en cy
ex it
8 2 .9
3 2 4 .0
0 7 2 .5
5 2 7 .0
4 7 7 .1
7 2 6 .1
2
A ll
3 0
si g
n s
6 2 .9
9 1 3 .4
6 5 5 .0
0 1 9 .9
5 5 7 .7
7 2 0 .4
1
N o te :
T h
er e
a re
fo u
r ca
te g
o ri
es :
p ro
h ib
it io
n (P
), w
a rn
in g
(W ),
m a n
d a to
ry (M
) a n
d g
u id
e (G
)
Table I.
IMDS 111,9
1492
R S
O N
R S
O
N u
m b
er C
o m
p re
h en
si o n
p er
fo rm
a n
ce (%
) N
u m
b er
C o m
p re
h en
si o n
p er
fo rm
a n
ce (%
) U
se r
fa ct
o r
R es
p o n
se M
ea n
S D
M ea
n S
D
A g
e 1 8 -2
7 y
ea rs
– –
– 1 7
5 3 .5
3 6 .3
4 2 8 -3
7 y
ea rs
1 5
6 4 .7
8 7 .7
6 1 0
5 3 .6
7 7 .5
7 3 8 -4
7 y
ea rs
1 1
5 9 .7
0 7 .8
1 1 1
5 9 .0
9 1 0 .6
8 4 8 -5
7 y
ea rs
1 3
5 8 .8
5 6 .8
2 9
5 4 .8
1 5 .4
9 5 8
y ea
rs o r
a b
o v
e 2
5 8 .3
3 9 .4
3 4
5 3 .7
5 6 .2
9 E
d u
ca ti
o n
le v
el P
ri m
a ry
– –
– 1
5 6 .6
7 N
A S
ec o n
d a ry
2 5 9 .1
7 7 .5
3 5 5 .5
6 0 .9
6 D
ip lo
m a
o r
a ss
o ci
a te
d d
eg re
e 1 0
6 4 .5
0 2 .2
8 1 1
5 4 .2
4 7 .3
5 U
n iv
er si
ty o r
a b
o v
e 2 9
6 0 .2
3 1 .4
4 3 6
5 5 .1
4 8 .2
0 In
d u
st ri
a l
se ct
o r
C o n
st ru
ct io
n 2 4
6 1 .0
4 1 .5
7 1 1
5 3 .7
9 9 .1
3 L
o g
is ti
c 4
6 4 .1
7 3 .7
0 1
5 6 .6
7 N
A G
o v
er n
m en
t d
ep a rt
m en
t 3
6 3 .8
9 5 .8
6 5 6 .3
9 9 .9
1 E
d u
ca ti
o n
a l
1 0
5 9 .6
7 2 .5
7 6
5 4 .4
4 1 .7
2 O
th er
– –
– 2 7
5 5 .2
5 7 .6
8 R
ev ie
w sa
fe ty
si g
n in
fo rm
a ti
o n
o u
ts id
e H
o n
g K
o n
g Y
es 2 2
6 5 .5
8 7 .6
6 1 4
5 4 .6
4 7 .2
8 N
o 1 9
5 9 .6
5 7 .7
7 3 7
5 5 .1
4 7 .8
4 T
im e
si n
ce la
st re
v ie
w o f
sa fe
ty si
g n
in fo
rm a ti
o n
o u
ts id
e H
o n
g K
o n
g
T o d
a y
6 6 5 .5
6 5 .5
4 3
5 7 .7
8 6 .7
4
O n
e d
a y
a g
o to
le ss
th a n
si x
m o n
th s
a g
o 8
5 9 .7
9 8 .2
8 9
5 3 .5
2 7 .6
6 S
ix m
o n
th s
o r
a b
o v
e 8
6 3 .1
3 8 .2
8 2
5 5 .0
0 9 .4
3 Y
ea rs
o f
o b
ta in
in g
re g
is te
re d
o ffi
ce r
st a tu
s L
es s
th a n
fi v
e y
ea rs
4 6 2 .0
8 4 .4
8 N
A F
iv e
to le
ss th
a n
te n
y ea
rs 1 7
6 2 .4
5 2 .1
7 T
en to
le ss
th a n
1 5
y ea
rs 1 4
6 0 .3
6 1 .4
3 1 5
to le
ss th
a n
2 0
y ea
rs 3
6 3 .8
9 6 .1
9 2 0
to le
ss th
a n
2 5
y ea
rs 2
5 5 .8
3 5 .8
3 2 5
y ea
rs o r
a b
o v
e 1
5 1 .6
7 N
A Y
ea rs
o f
a ct
iv e
sa fe
ty w
o rk
ex p
er ie
n ce
L es
s th
a n
fi v
e y
ea rs
4 6 2 .0
8 4 .4
8 N
A F
iv e
to le
ss th
a n
te n
y ea
rs 1 6
6 3 .3
3 2 .1
8 T
en to
le ss
th a n
1 5
y ea
rs 1 4
5 9 .6
4 1 .5
5 1 5
to le
ss th
a n
2 0
y ea
rs 4
6 2 .5
4 .5
9
(c o n ti
n u ed
)
Table II. A summary of responses
for the ten user factors and mean comprehension performance for different
groups of participants
Understanding industrial
safety signs
1493
R S
O N
R S
O
N u
m b
er C
o m
p re
h en
si o n
p er
fo rm
a n
ce (%
) N
u m
b er
C o m
p re
h en
si o n
p er
fo rm
a n
ce (%
) U
se r
fa ct
o r
R es
p o n
se M
ea n
S D
M ea
n S
D
2 0
to le
ss th
a n
2 5
y ea
rs 2
5 5 .8
3 5 .8
3 2 5
y ea
rs o r
a b
o v
e 1
5 1 .6
7 N
A F
re q
u en
cy o f
re v
ie w
in g
sa fe
ty si
g n
in fo
rm a ti
o n
In p
a st
si x
m o n
th s
A t
le a st
o n
ce a
d a y
1 4
6 0 .1
2 7 .5
0 N
A T
h re
e to
fo u
r ti
m es
a w
ee k
6 6 2 .7
8 8 .5
4 O
n e
o r
tw o
ti m
es a
w ee
k 7
5 9 .2
9 8 .6
5 T
h re
e to
fo u
r ti
m es
a m
o n
th 5
6 3 .6
7 5 .4
5 O
n e
o r
tw o
ti m
es a
m o n
th 8
6 0 .9
3 8 .8
2 N
ev er
re v
ie w
in p
a st
si x
m o n
th s
1 7 1 .1
7 N
A In
p a st
1 2
m o n
th s
A t
le a st
o n
ce a
d a y
1 3
6 0 .2
6 7 .7
8 N
A T
h re
e to
fo u
r ti
m es
a w
ee k
6 6 2 .2
2 8 .7
3 O
n e
o r
tw o
ti m
es a
w ee
k 7
5 7 .8
6 6 .9
2 T
h re
e to
fo u
r ti
m es
a m
o n
th 6
6 5 .0
0 5 .8
7 O
n e
o r
tw o
ti m
es a
m o n
th 8
6 0 .8
3 8 .8
2 N
ev er
re v
ie w
in p
a st
si x
m o n
th s
1 7 1 .6
7 N
A T
im e
si n
ce la
st re
v ie
w o f
sa fe
ty si
g n
in fo
rm a ti
o n
in H
o n
g K
o n
g
T o d
a y
2 7
5 9 .9
4 1 .4
4 N
A O
n e
d a y
a g
o to
le ss
th a n
si x
m o n
th s
a g
o 1 2
6 2 .6
4 2 .3
2 S
ix m
o n
th s
o r
a b
o v
e 2
7 0 .0
0 3 .3
3
Table II.
IMDS 111,9
1494
serve the survey purposes, and had the correct wording and response categories. The face and content validity of the questionnaire were assessed by experienced safety and health professionals of the Hong Kong Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (Hong Kong) (Litwin, 1995).
4.4 Procedure Voluntary participants were recruited to complete the questionnaire for this study. They were members of local safety and health institutions and were invited to participate in this study after attending seminar activities. Altogether 120 invitations were extended and 92 participants were successfully recruited. At the beginning of the study, each participant was briefed on the objectives and given instructions. They were then asked to complete the questionnaire. Basically the questionnaire could be completed by the respondents without much difficulty. The first author acted as a moderator and provided guidance to the participants if necessary. The questionnaire took about 30 minutes to complete.
5. Experimental results A total of 41 Hong Kong RSOs and 51 NRSOs voluntarily participated in this study. There were 85 males and seven females. The age range of the RSO group was 28-58 years while the age range was 18-58 years for the NRSO group. The mean ages for the RSO and NRSO groups were 42.99 years (SD ¼ 9.36) and 37.21 years (SD ¼ 13.19), respectively.
5.1 Comprehension score In this study, the comprehension score of a sign refers to the accuracy level for understanding its meaning while comprehension performance denotes the performance of a participant in the comprehension task overall. The comprehension performance of the participants will be discussed in Section 5.2. The descriptive statistics of individual sign comprehension scores for RSOs and NRSOs are summarized in Table I. The overall mean and standard deviation of comprehension
Group Sign features Mean SD Coefficient of variation (%) Minimum Maximum
Registered safety officers (41) Familiarity 54.32 13.65 25.14 21.24 84.27 Concreteness 62.99 13.46 21.37 26.46 92.07 Simplicity 66.51 8.96 13.48 45.98 84.51 Meaningfulness 64.98 11.11 17.09 34.27 85.22
Non-registered safety officers (51) Familiarity 43.30 13.38 30.91 19.59 81.57 Concreteness 58.68 12.25 20.87 23.27 83.10 Simplicity 63.32 8.80 13.89 43.39 87.16 Meaningfulness 64.61 10.92 16.91 37.25 88.49
All participants (92) Familiarity 48.21 12.98 26.92 20.33 82.77 Concreteness 60.60 12.31 20.31 24.70 84.11 Simplicity 64.74 8.37 12.92 44.54 85.98 Meaningfulness 64.77 10.71 16.53 35.92 86.22
Table III. Descriptive statistics of sign feature ratings for
the two groups of participants and all
participants
Understanding industrial
safety signs
1495
G ro
u p
S ig
n fe
a tu
re s
S ig
n s
w it
h lo
w es
t ra
ti n
g s
S ig
n s
w it
h h
ig h
es t
ra ti
n g
s
R S
O F
a m
il ia
ri ty
W 2
– d
a n
g er
! H
a rm
fu l
(2 1 .2
4 )
P 2
– d
o n
o t
u se
m o b
il e
p h
o n
e (8
4 .2
7 )
C o n
cr et
en es
s W
2 –
d a n
g er
! H
a rm
fu l
(2 6 .4
6 )
M 7
– k
ee p
lo ck
ed (9
2 .0
7 )
S im
p li
ci ty
W 1 5
– d
a n
g er
! R
o ta
ti n
g p
a rt
s, k
ee p
g u
a rd
cl o se
d (4
5 .9
8 )
P 2
– d
o n
o t
u se
m o b
il e
p h
o n
e (8
4 .5
1 )
M ea
n in
g fu
ln es
s W
2 –
d a n
g er
! H
a rm
fu l
(3 4 .2
7 )
M 1
– w
ea r
fa ce
sh ie
ld (8
5 .2
2 )
N R
S O
F a m
il ia
ri ty
W 2
– d
a n
g er
! H
a rm
fu l
(1 9 .5
9 )
P 2
– d
o n
o t
u se
m o b
il e
p h
o n
e (8
1 .5
7 )
C o n
cr et
en es
s W
2 –
d a n
g er
! H
a rm
fu l
(2 3 .2
7 )
M 1
– w
ea r
fa ce
sh ie
ld (8
3 .1
0 )
S im
p li
ci ty
W 1 5
– d
a n
g er
! R
o ta
ti n
g p
a rt
s, k
ee p
g u
a rd
cl o se
d (4
3 .3
9 )
P 2
– d
o n
o t
u se
m o b
il e
p h
o n
e (8
7 .1
6 )
(c o n ti
n u ed
)
Table IV. The signs with the highest and lowest ratings in each cognitive sign feature for the two safety officer groups and all participants
IMDS 111,9
1496
G ro
u p
S ig
n fe
a tu
re s
S ig
n s
w it
h lo
w es
t ra
ti n
g s
S ig
n s
w it
h h
ig h
es t
ra ti
n g
s
M ea
n in
g fu
ln es
s W
2 –
d a n
g er
! H
a rm
fu l
(3 7 .2
5 )
P 2
– d
o n
o t
u se
m o b
il e
p h
o n
e (8
8 .4
9 )
A ll
p a rt
ic ip
a n
ts F
a m
il ia
ri ty
W 2
– d
a n
g er
! H
a rm
fu l
(2 0 .3
3 )
P 2
– d
o n
o t
u se
m o b
il e
p h
o n
e (8
2 .7
7 )
C o n
cr et
en es
s W
2 –
d a n
g er
! H
a rm
fu l
(2 4 .7
0 )
M 1
– w
ea r
fa ce
sh ie
ld (8
4 .1
1 )
S im
p li
ci ty
W 1 5
– d
a n
g er
! R
o ta
ti n
g p
a rt
s, k
ee p
g u
a rd
cl o se
d (4
4 .5
4 )
P 2
– d
o n
o t
u se
m o b
il e
p h
o n
e (8
5 .9
8 )
M ea
n in
g fu
ln es
s W
2 –
d a n
g er
! H
a rm
fu l
(3 5 .9
2 )
M 1
– w
ea r
fa ce
sh ie
ld (8
6 .2
2 )
Table IV.
Understanding industrial
safety signs
1497
scores for all 30 signs were 57.77 and 20.41 percent, respectively. The comprehension scores for the prohibition, warning, mandatory, and guide categories were 53.89, 48.91, 78.57, 77.17 percent, respectively. The single data entry in the guide category made it impossible to statistically compare the difference between it and data from the other three categories. However, student’s t-test conducted on data from the other categories showed that the comprehension scores for prohibition and warning signs were significantly lower than that for mandatory signs ( p , 0.05).
For NRSOs, the sign with maximum comprehension score was M7 (keep locked, 88.24 percent) whereas M1 (wear face shield) was correctly comprehended by all RSOs (100 percent). Both the RSOs and NRSOs comprehended W6 (caution! Belt drive hand abrasion) worst (RSOs – 26.83 percent; NRSOs – 21.57 percent).
5.2 User factors Table II shows the users factors, the number of participants’ responses to each of the factors, and the comprehension performance of the participants in each of the response categories. For the factor of reviewing safety sign information outside Hong Kong, 53.66 percent of the RSOs and 27.45 percent of the NRSOs had reviewed safety sign information outside Hong Kong. For these participants, a follow-up question on the time since last reviewing safety sign information was asked. For the RSOs, the factors “years since obtaining registered safety office status”, “years of active safety work experience since registering as a safety officer”, “frequency of reviewing safety information”, and “time since last review of safety sign information in Hong Kong” were investigated.
5.2.1 Comprehension performance and user factors. The mean comprehension performance for the groups of RSOs and NRSOs were 61.22 percent (SD ¼ 7.76 percent) and 55.00 percent (SD ¼ 7.62 percent), respectively. The comprehension performance data of all participants was normally distributed (Kolmogorov-Smirnov, p . 0.05). For the RSO group, personal experience of participants on safety and health issues was assessed with two indicators: years since obtaining registered officer status, and years of active safety work experience since registering as a safety officer. Pearson correlation analysis was conducted to investigate the association between personal experience on safety and health issues and comprehension performance for the participants. The results showed that participants’ comprehension of safety signs did not change significantly with years since obtaining registered officer status, or with years of active safety work experience ( p’s . 0.05).
Consideration was given to selection of the appropriate statistical tests for examining the effects of the other eight user factors on comprehension performance. A test of validity of assumptions for conducting analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed and the results showed that for the RSO group, only the factors of age, industrial sector, frequency of reviewing safety sign information could be analyzed with ANOVA while for the NRSO group, only the factors of reviewing safety sign information outside Hong Kong, and time since last review of safety sign information outside Hong Kong could be examined by ANOVA. All other user factors for the two groups of participants were analyzed with Kruskal-Wallis test. The results of these Kruskal-Wallis tests showed that the RSO group performed better in sign comprehension than the NRSO group ( p , 0.05). However, for other factors, no significant effect was found for the two groups of participants by either ANOVA or Kruskal-Wallis test.
IMDS 111,9
1498
5.3 Cognitive sign features and comprehension score The Appendix shows a summary of subjective ratings given to the safety signs tested in this study. The mean ratings for familiarity, concreteness, simplicity, and meaningfulness for all 30 safety signs were 48.21, 60.60, 64.74, and 64.77, respectively, illustrating that the signs were perceived to be moderately unfamiliar, concrete, simple, and meaningful by participants. The descriptive statistics for the sign feature ratings for the RSOs and NRSOs are shown in Table III. With the exception of the familiarity rating for the NRSOs, all ratings were all above 50 percent. The signs with the highest and lowest ratings for each cognitive sign feature for the two safety officer groups and all participants are shown in Table IV. The ratings on the four sign features and sign comprehension score were normally distributed (Kolmogorov-Smirnov, p . 0.05). Pearson correlation analysis was conducted to examine the interrelationships amongst sign features and comprehension score. The results showed that there were significant interrelationships among the four cognitive sign features (Table V). The highest correlation was found between meaningfulness and concreteness (r ¼ 0.968, p , 0.001). All the four sign features were significantly correlated with comprehension score ( p’s , 0.01). Familiarity was found to have highest correlation (r ¼ 0.612) while meaningfulness had the lowest correlation with comprehensibility score (r ¼ 0.557).
6. Discussion The purpose of this study was to investigate the comprehension level of industrial safety signs amongst Hong Kong registered and non-registered safety officers, and to examine the interrelationships between cognitive features and comprehension scores for the signs. The results showed that comprehension scores differed significantly from sign to sign. The ability to communicate a message clearly is very important for a pictorial symbol when conveying safety-related information because poorly-designed symbols can lead to injury as a result of lack of understanding or misinterpretation (Raskin, 2000). The relatively low-sign comprehensibility scores found here showed that the industrial safety signs did not transmit the intended messages to users. The results also clearly indicated that even the RSOs who were supposed to be familiar with industrial safety and health matters could not interpret the meanings of the signs successfully. It must surely be the case that the general public will find it even more difficult to correctly interpret such signs. It is therefore suggested that an effective education program to promote the intended messages of such signs should be conducted or, preferably, the signs should be redesigned as soon as possible and then launched with a public education program.
Familiarity Concreteness Simplicity Meaningfulness
Familiarity 1 Concreteness 0.909 * 1 Simplicity 0.872 * 0.782 * 1 Meaningfulness 0.942 * 0.968 * 0.822 * 1 Comprehension score 0.612 * 0.571 * 0.596 * 0.557 *
Notes: Correlation is significant at: *0.01 level (two-tailed); n ¼ 30
Table V. Pearson correlation
coefficients amongst cognitive sign features
and comprehension score for all signs
Understanding industrial
safety signs
1499
6.1 User factors Of the ten user factors examined in this study, only the possession of RSO status was found to be a significant predictor of participants’ comprehension performance. Participants with RSO status performed better than those without RSO status. In Hong Kong, before obtaining the RSO status, safety officers were required to have at least one year experience relevant to the duties of a safety officer, and also to complete safety courses recognized by the Labour Department. Therefore, participants with RSO status should have more safety knowledge to help them to elicit the meanings of the signs.
For the age factor, Hancock et al. (2004) investigated the comprehensibility of 40 safety symbols from the National Electrical Manufacturers Association for 52 younger (18-23 years) and 52 older (64-75 years) adults. They found that older participants’ comprehension was significantly worse than that of younger participants. However, in the study here, no difference was found in comprehension performance amongst different age groups for the RSOs and the NRSOs. This might be because most of the participants in this study were in the age group of 28-57 years, and there was a lack of older participants aged 64 or above as used by Hancock et al. (2004).
For the education level factor, participants in this study with university or above education did not perform better at sign comprehension than those with below university education level. This finding agreed with the results of a study on dangerous materials symbols that found that education did not have significant effect on symbol comprehension (Chen and Wang, 2003).
It was found that the comprehension performance of participants was not associated with the industrial sectors in which they worked. In Hong Kong, there were 2,755 industrial accidents in the construction industry in 2009 and the number of fatalities was the highest among all industries (Hong Kong Labour Department, 2009b). Gyekye (2006) investigated workers’ perceptions of workplace safety and showed that relative to their colleagues in the low-accident category sectors, workers in the high-accident category sectors exhibited negative perceptions on work safety, safety programmes, supervisors, and co-workers’ contributions.
In the Hong Kong construction industry, there is a multi-tier subcontracting system that allows most construction workers to be self-employed or employed by subcontractors or sub-subcontractors, so that workers may work on one site for a very short period of time (Tam et al., 2003). Ma et al. (1999) noted that in Hong Kong the high mobility of workers usually produces a wrong concept that they are not responsible for site safety and that therefore they might have lower risk perception than others. Chan et al. (2004) also noted that there is a general lack of awareness of safety management and safety improvement techniques by many senior managers in construction and client companies. Safety officers, especially those who work in the construction industry need to play a more prominent role in ensuring workplace safety, and in transferring safety knowledge to the workers. It does not seem unreasonable to expect that safety officers working in the construction industry should be particularly aware of and familiar with the use of safety signs and therefore able to easily interpret the correct meanings of safety signs. However, in this study, those in the construction industry did not perform any better than their counterparts in other industries. The results here suggest that there is a need to enhance RSOs’ risk perception in general and to increase awareness of the importance of safety signs so as to improve
IMDS 111,9
1500
workplace safety and organizational safety culture, which was shown to influence industrial injury rates (Ali et al., 2009; Lingard et al., 2011).
Milczarek and Najmiec (2004) indicated that worker attitude towards risk and safety is one of the important dimensions of company safety culture. Employees need to be aware of, and understand, health and safety issues and their importance to be able to follow safe working practices (Woollatt, 1996; Madsen and Ulhoi, 2001). Kharbanda and Stallworthy (1991) noted that an essential element in any safety culture is proper training. From a sociotechnical perspective, training programs have been suggested as a mechanism for enhancing attitudes, especially to improve safety and occupational health (Grau et al., 2002). Piamonte et al. (2001) also suggested that without sufficient learning opportunities and learning aids, symbols may be harder to understand by almost anyone than previously thought. Here, the results strongly suggest that a test of safety sign meanings should be implemented as part of the process of obtaining registration status, and refresher training programs on safety symbols should be regularly provided to registered and non-registered safety officers, and workers.
The results also showed that the experience of reviewing safety sign information outside Hong Kong did not help participants comprehend the safety signs better. This may be because even though signs may carry the same message, there may be differences between sign designs in other countries and those in Hong Kong. Although some of the signs are very similar to those used in other countries, there are differences that may be related to cultural environment and so reviewing safety sign information outside Hong Kong may not help much in some cases for interpreting local symbols. Although the culture factor was not examined in this study, the importance of designing signs that are independent of culture or of high multi-cultural compatibility is desirable because past studies have indicated that the comprehensibility of a symbol across international borders can be increased if the symbol design is culture independent or of high multi-cultural compatibility (Chan et al., 2009). It is suggested that further research needs to be conducted on examining the cultural factor of safety signs used in different countries.
It was found that the factor of time since last review of safety sign information was not significantly associated with comprehension score. Against expectation, participants who had not reviewed safety sign information for comparatively long period of time did not perform worse than those who recently reviewed safety sign information. The frequency of reviewing safety sign information had no effect on sign comprehension performance. Participants who reviewed safety sign information frequently did not perform better than those who reviewed safety sign information less frequently. There are several problems here. The safety sign review frequency was self-reported and there are possible inaccuracies in self-reporting. Also, there was no information about what the participants understood by a review. It is possible that the review was very cursory and did not require active participation. It is also possible that during a review participants were not really aware of the sign content that they were reviewing; therefore they were not able to perceive and recognize the functions of safety signs. In any case, the result here suggests the need for a well designed review process that will increase long- and short-term performance.
Personal experience on safety and health issues was assessed with two indicators: years since obtaining registered officer status and years of active safety work experience since registration as a safety officer. Neither of these factors influenced sign
Understanding industrial
safety signs
1501
comprehension performance. It is not known why this result was obtained but it may be that experienced safety officers no longer pay much attention to safety signs that in many cases must seem familiar and therefore sign information is not retrieved from memory and reviewed, thus loss of clarity about sign information may occur over time (Henderson, 1999). Also, new signs and infrequently used signs may not be attended to unless there is a conscious and active effort to update and refresh knowledge. It seems that the safety officers here were no more aware of safety sign information as a result of experience after they obtained RSO status. It may not be an entirely appropriate interpretation but such results appear to be familiarity breeding contempt.
6.2 Cognitive sign features In this study, the selected safety signs were generally perceived to be moderately unfamiliar, concrete, simple, and meaningful by all participants. For both the RSOs and NRSOs, sign W2 (danger, harmful) was rated as the least familiar sign and sign P2 (do not use mobile phone) was the most familiar sign, probably because the P2 sign is commonly seen in public area. For concreteness rating, sign M1 (wear face shield) and sign M7 (keep locked) were assessed as the most concrete by the NRSO group and RSO group, respectively. Sign W2 (danger, harmful) which contains an image of a cross was perceived to be the most abstract sign by the two groups of participants. These results were consistent with the past findings that concrete signs have obvious connections with the real world, while abstract signs consist mainly of shapes, arrows and lines, and do not have such obvious connections (McDougall and Curry, 2004; Ng and Chan, 2007a). Regarding sign simplicity, sign P2 (do not use mobile phone) was perceived as the simplest one while sign W15 (danger! Rotating parts, keep guard closed) was perceived as the most complex, implying that the perceived simplicity of a sign was related to number of elements in the sign. For sign meaningfulness, RSOs identified sign M1 (wear face shield) as the most meaningful sign and NRSOs identified sign P2 (do not use mobile phone) as the most meaningful one. Sign W2 (danger, harmful) was rated as the most meaningless sign by the two groups of participants.
6.3 Relationships amongst cognitive sign features and sign comprehension Significant and positive associations were found amongst the four sign features, indicating that the amount of variability on the perception of one cognitive feature for a safety sign was related to other cognitive features. Comprehension ability of participants was high for familiar signs and low for unfamiliar signs. Hancock et al. (2004) also found that symbol familiarity was positively correlated with symbol comprehension. It was suggested that the safety management office should use familiar symbols as much as possible (Rosson and Carroll, 2002). Also, safety management personnel should take responsibility for providing appropriate sign training to workers and strongly emphasize the consequences of not giving attention to the hazards that are represented by safety signs. Such training will help to ensure that workers are able to comprehend sign meanings and will reinforce safety culture.
Concrete signs produced higher comprehensibility scores than abstract ones. As concrete signs usually illustrate real objects whereas abstract signs do not, they have obvious connections with the real world while abstract signs consist mainly of shapes, arrows and lines (McDougall and Curry, 2004). Without training or help, users have to learn and understand abstract signs without clues from the representational elements in
IMDS 111,9
1502
the sign itself. Therefore, it is likely that access to meaning is much more difficult with abstract signs. Regarding sign simplicity, simple signs led to a higher comprehensibility score than complex signs. This result suggests that the extraneous decorative parts of a sign may confound user understanding (Bruyas et al., 1998). Marcus (1996) recommended that good icon design should be simple and clear and Dewar (1999) suggested that simple symbols are better than complicated ones especially when perceived at a distance. With regard to sign meaningfulness, the comprehensibility scores were high for meaningful signs and low for meaningless signs, probably because meaningful stimuli are related to associated imagery and easily elicit a meaning in one’s mind (Preece et al., 1994).
6.4 Limitation Notwithstanding the success here of revealing the relationships of industrial safety sign comprehensibility with user factors and sign features, there are limitations to this study. First, the data on personal characteristics (e.g. registration status) were based solely on self-reporting. With this method it is possible that some respondents may have been inclined to embellish their answers and of course, there is always the chance that there might have been a gap between self-reported and actual behaviour. Second, most of the participants in this study were males, so further research is needed to collect more data from females in order to make the results more generally applicable. In view of the general trend to encourage older workers to remain in the workforce, it would be useful to test workers older than the ones available for this study.
7. Conclusion This study compared the industrial safety sign comprehension performance of registered and non-registered safety officers in Hong Kong. The findings provide some useful information for safety management in the selection and evaluation of safety signs for improving workplace safety and organizational culture. The results demonstrated that the effectiveness with which safety sign messages are communicated relates to both the user characteristics and cognitive sign features. The comprehensibility of safety signs was better for the signs which were familiar, concrete, simple, and meaningful, which suggest that safety management office should use familiar symbols as much as possible.
The possession of RSO status was a significant predictor of comprehension performance amongst the user factors tested. Nevertheless, the findings here suggested that there is a need to enhance RSOs’ risk perception and to increase awareness of the importance of safety signs so as to improve workplace safety and reduce industrial injury rates. Safety officers, especially those who work in the construction industry need to play a more prominent role in ensuring workplace safety, and in transferring safety knowledge to the workers. From a sociotechnical perspective, training programs are suggested as a mechanism for enhancing safety attitudes and emphasizing the consequences of not giving attention to the hazards represented by safety signs. The results also strongly suggest the implementation of a test of safety sign meanings as part of the process of obtaining registration status. Refresher training programs on current and redesigned safety symbols should also be regularly provided to registered and non-registered safety officers, and workers. It needs to be noted that the research findings here are limited by the small sample size of female participants. A larger sample size of female respondents would allow meaningful comparison of results between the two genders.
Understanding industrial
safety signs
1503
References
Ali, H., Abdullah, N.A.C. and Subramaniam, C. (2009), “Management practice in safety culture and its influence on workplace injury: an industrial study in Malaysia”, Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 18 No. 5, pp. 470-7.
ANSI Z535.3 (2002), Criteria for Safety Symbols, National Electrical Manufacturers Association, Washington, DC.
Arend, U., Muthig, K.P. and Wandmacher, J. (1987), “Evidence for global feature superiority in menu selection by icons”, Behavior and Information Technology, Vol. 6, pp. 411-26.
Bruyas, M.P., Le Breton, B. and Pauzié, A. (1998), “Ergonomic guidelines for the design of pictorial information”, International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics, Vol. 21 No. 5, pp. 407-13.
Chan, A.H.S. and Ng, A.W.Y. (2010a), “Effects of sign characteristics and training methods on safety sign training effectiveness”, Ergonomics, Vol. 53 No. 11, pp. 1325-46.
Chan, A.H.S. and Ng, A.W.Y. (2010b), “Investigation of guessability of industrial safety signs: effects of prospective-user factors and cognitive sign features”, International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics, Vol. 40 No. 6, pp. 689-97.
Chan, A.H.S., Kwok, W.Y. and Duffy, V.G. (2004), “Using A.H.P. for determining priority in a safety management system”, Industrial Management & Data Systems, Vol. 104 No. 5, pp. 430-45.
Chan, A.H.S., Han, S.H., Ng, A.W.Y. and Park, W. (2009), “Hong Kong Chinese and Korean comprehension of American security safety symbols”, International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics, Vol. 39 No. 5, pp. 835-50.
Chen, M.T. and Wang, A.H. (2003), “Effects of dangerous materials symbols, educational background, and gender on conceptual compatibility”, Institute of Occupational Safety and Health Journal, Vol. 11 No. 3, pp. 188-96.
Dewar, R. (1999), “Design and evaluation of public information symbols”, in Zwaga, H.J.G., Boersema, T. and Hoonhout, H.C.M. (Eds), Visual Information for Everyday Use: Design and Research Perspectives, Taylor & Francis, London, pp. 285-303.
Dowse, R. and Ehlers, M.S. (2003), “The influence of education on the interpretation of pharmaceutical pictograms for communicating medicine instructions”, International Journal of Pharmacy Practice, Vol. 11 No. 1, pp. 11-18.
Dowse, R. and Ehlers, M.S. (2004), “Pictograms for conveying medicine instructions: comprehension in various South African language groups”, South African Journal of Science, Vol. 100 Nos 11/12, pp. 687-93.
Edington, D.W. and Schultz, A.B. (2008), “The total value of health: a review of literature”, International Journal of Workplace Health Management, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 8-19.
FIU Regulations (2002), Factories and Industrial Undertakings (Safety Officers and Safety Supervisors) Regulations, Chapter 59Z, Regulation 5, Hong Kong Government, available at: www.legislation.gov.hk/blis_ind.nsf/WebView?OpenAgent&vwpg¼ CurAllEngDoc *59 *100 *59.25#59.25
Gabbar, H.A. (2007), “Intelligent topology analyzer for improved plant operation”, Industrial Management & Data Systems, Vol. 107 No. 2, pp. 229-50.
Goetzel, R.Z., Ozminkowski, R.J., Bowen, J. and Tabrizi, M.J. (2008), “Employer integration of health promotion and health protection programs”, International Journal of Workplace Health Management, Vol. 1 No. 2, pp. 109-22.
Golding, D. and Golding, J. (1987), “Managing the environment”, Industrial Management & Data Systems, Vol. 87 Nos 9/10, pp. 9-11.
IMDS 111,9
1504
Grau, R., Martı́nez, I.M., Agut, S. and Salanova, M. (2002), “Safety attitudes and their relationship to safety training and generalised self-efficacy”, International Journal of Occupational Safety and Ergonomics, Vol. 8 No. 1, pp. 23-35.
Gyekye, S.A. (2006), “Workers’ perceptions of workplace safety: an African perspective”, International Journal of Occupational Safety and Ergonomics, Vol. 12 No. 1, pp. 31-42.
Hancock, H.E., Rogers, W.A., Schroeder, D. and Fisk, A.D. (2004), “Safety symbol comprehension: effects of symbol type, familiarity, and age”, Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Vol. 46 No. 2, pp. 183-95.
Hebblewhite, B. (2009), “Mine safety – through appropriate combination of technology and management practice”, Procedia Earth and Planetary Science, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 13-19.
Henderson, J. (1999), Memory and Forgetting, Routledge, London.
Hong Kong Labour Department (2009a), Labour Department Annual Report 2009, available at: www.labour.gov.hk/text/eng/public/iprd/2009/home/chapter4.htm
Hong Kong Labour Department (2009b), Occupational Safety and Health Statistics Bulletin, Issue No. 9, August, available at: www.oshc.org.hk/tchi/resource/health.asp?
Hong Kong Labour Department (2010), Summary of Occupational Safety and Health Statistics – 1st Three Quarters of 2010, available at: www.labour.gov.hk/eng/osh/pdf/OSH_ Statistics_2010_1st_3Qs.pdf
International Labour Organization (2011), Main Statistics of Occupational Injuries, LABORSTA Internet, available at: http://laborsta.ilo.org/data_topic_E.html
ISO 3864-3 (2006), Graphical Symbols – Safety Colours and Safety Signs – Part 3: Design Principles for Graphical Symbols for Use in Safety Signs, International Organization for Standardization, Geneva.
Jordan, P.W. (1998), An Introduction to Usability, Taylor & Francis, London.
Kharbanda, O.P. and Stallworthy, E.A. (1991), “Company culture – its role in an industrial society”, Industrial Management and Data Systems, Vol. 91 No. 2, pp. 2-59.
Laurence, D. (2005), “Safety rules and regulations on mine sites – the problem and a solution”, Journal of Safety Research, Vol. 36 No. 1, pp. 39-50.
Law, W.K., Chan, A.H.S. and Pun, K.F. (2006), “Prioritising the safety management elements: a hierarchical analysis for manufacturing enterprises”, Industrial Management and Data Systems, Vol. 106 No. 6, pp. 778-92.
Lesch, M.F. (2003), “Comprehension and memory for warning symbols: age-related differences and impact of training”, Journal of Safety Research, Vol. 34, pp. 495-505.
Leung, A.K.P. and Hellier, E. (1998), “Perceived hazard and understandability of signal words and warning pictorials by Chinese community in Britain”, in Hanson, M. (Ed.), Contemporary Ergonomics 1998: Proceedings of the Ergonomics Society Annual Conference, Taylor & Francis, London, pp. 321-5.
Lingard, H., Cooke, T. and Blismas, N. (2011), “Coworkers’ response to occupational health and safety: an overlooked dimension of group-level safety climate in the construction industry?”, Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, Vol. 18 No. 2, pp. 159-75.
Litwin, M.S. (1995), The Survey Kit 7: How to Measure Survey Reliability and Validity, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA.
Liu, J., Li, B., Lin, B. and Nguyen, V. (2007), “Key issues and challenges of risk management and insurance in China’s construction industry: an empirical study”, Industrial Management & Data Systems, Vol. 107 No. 3, pp. 382-96.
Understanding industrial
safety signs
1505
Liu, L., Hoelscher, U. and Gruchmann, T. (2005), “Symbol comprehension in different countries: experience gained from medical device area”, in Auinger, A. (Ed.), Workshop-Proceedings der 5 fachübergreifenden Konferenz Mensch und Computer, Oesterreichische Computer Gesellschaft, Wien, pp. 81-7.
McDougall, S. and Curry, M. (2004), “More than just a picture: icon interpretation in context”, Proceedings of First International Workshop on Coping with Complexity, University of Bath, Bath, UK, 16-17 September, available at: www.cs.bath.ac.uk/,complex/cwc2004/ Proceedings%20of%20CWC%202004.pdf
McDougall, S.J.P., Curry, M.B. and de Bruijn, O. (1999), “Measuring symbol and icon characteristics: norms for concreteness, complexity, meaningfulness, familiarity, and semantic distance for 239 symbols”, Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, Vol. 31 No. 3, pp. 487-519.
Ma, T.Y.F. and Chan, A.P.C. (1999), “The attitude of workers toward construction site safety – a study of site safety in Hong Kong”, in Singh, A., Hinze, J. and Coble, R.J. (Eds), Implementation of Safety and Health on Construction Sites, A.A. Balkema, Rotterdam, pp. 63-8.
Madsen, H. and Ulhoi, J.P. (2001), “Greening of human resources: environmental awareness and training interests within the workforce”, Industrial Management & Data Systems, Vol. 101 No. 2, pp. 57-65.
Marcus, A. (1996), “Icon and symbol design issues for graphical user interfaces”, in del Galdo, E.M. and Nielsen, J. (Eds), International User Interfaces, Wiley, New York, NY, pp. 257-70.
Milczarek, M. and Najmiec, A. (2004), “The relationship between workers’ safety culture and accidents, near accidents and health problem”, International Journal of Occupational Safety and Ergonomics, Vol. 10 No. 1, pp. 25-33.
Mono, R. (1997), Design for Product Understanding Liber, Liber AB, Stockholm.
Ng, A.W.Y. and Chan, A.H.S. (2007a), “Cognitive design features on traffic signs”, in Ao, S.I. (Ed.), Recent Advances in Engineering and Computer Science, Newswood, Hong Kong, pp. 97-102.
Ng, A.W.Y. and Chan, A.H.S. (2007b), “The guessability of traffic signs: effects of prospective-user factors and sign design features”, Accident Analysis and Prevention, Vol. 39, pp. 1245-57.
Ng, A.W.Y. and Chan, A.H.S. (2008), “The effects of driver factors and sign design features on the comprehensibility of traffic signs”, Journal of Safety Research, Vol. 39, pp. 321-8.
Nuñez, I. and Villanueva, M. (2011), “Safety capital: the management of organizational knowledge on occupational health and safety”, Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol. 23 No. 1, pp. 56-71.
Piamonte, D.P.T., Abeysekera, J.D.A. and Ohlsson, K. (2001), “Understanding small graphical symbols: a cross-cultural study”, International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics, Vol. 27 No. 6, pp. 399-404.
Preece, J., Rogers, Y., Sharp, H., Beryon, D., Holland, S. and Carey, T. (1994), Human-Computer Interaction, Addison-Wesley, Harlow.
Raskin, J. (2000), Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems, ACM Press, New York, NY.
Rosson, M.B. and Carroll, J.M. (2002), Usability Engineering: Scenario-Based Development of Human-Computer Interaction, Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA.
Rousseau, G.K., Lamson, N. and Rogers, W.A. (1998), “Designing warnings to compensate for age-related changes in perceptual and cognitive abilities”, Psychology and Marketing, Vol. 15 No. 7, pp. 643-62.
IMDS 111,9
1506
Smith-Jackson, T.L. and Essuman-Johnson, A. (2002), “Cultural ergonomics in Ghana, West Africa: a descriptive survey of industry and trade workers’ interpretations of safety symbols”, International Journal of Occupational Safety and Ergonomics, Vol. 8 No. 1, pp. 37-50.
Sneddon, A., Mearns, K., Flin, R. and Bryden, R. (2004), “Safety and situation awareness in offshore crews”, paper presented at the SPE International Conference on Health, Safety, and Environment in Oil and Gas Exploration and Production, Calgary, 29-31 March.
Tam, C.M., Fung, I.W.H., Yeung, T.C.L. and Tung, K.C.F. (2003), “Relationship between construction safety signs and symbols recognition and characteristics of construction personnel”, Construction Management and Economics, Vol. 21 No. 7, pp. 745-53.
Whittingham, R.B. (2004), The Blame Machine: Why Human Error Causes Accidents, Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford.
Wolff, J.S. and Wogalter, M.S. (1998), “Comprehension of pictorial symbols: effects of context and test method”, Human Factors, Vol. 40 No. 2, pp. 173-86.
Wong, F.K.W., Chan, A.P.C., Yam, M.C.H., Wong, E.Y.S., Tse, K.T.C., Yip, K.K.C. and Cheung, E. (2009), “Findings from a research study of construction safety in Hong Kong: accidents related to fall of person from height”, Journal of Engineering, Design and Technology, Vol. 7 No. 2, pp. 130-42.
Woollatt, C. (1996), “Managing safely”, Industrial Management & Data Systems, Vol. 96 No. 6, pp. 20-2.
Yu, R.F., Chan, A.H.S. and Salvendy, G. (2004), “Chinese perception of implied hazard of signal words and surround shapes”, Human Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing, Vol. 14 No. 1, pp. 69-80.
Zwetsloot, G.I.J.M., van Scheppingen, A.R., Dijkman, A.J., Heinrich, J. and den Besten, H. (2010), “The organizational benefits of investing in workplace health”, International Journal of Workplace Health Management, Vol. 3 No. 2, pp. 143-59.
About the authors K.L. Chan is a Research Associate in the Department of Manufacturing Engineering and Engineering Management, City University of Hong Kong.
Alan H.S. Chan is Associate Professor in the Department of Manufacturing Engineering and Engineering Management, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. He has been contributing to his profession by serving various international and local professional societies and has also conducted many well-cited studies in the areas of occupational safety management and human factors. Alan H.S. Chan is the corresponding author and can be contacted at: [email protected]
To purchase reprints of this article please e-mail: [email protected] Or visit our web site for further details: www.emeraldinsight.com/reprints
Understanding industrial
safety signs
1507
Appendix
Group Sign Sign features RSO NRSO All participants
P1 Familiarity 60.24 42.08 50.17 Concreteness 69.39 54.63 61.21 Simplicity 76.59 63.06 69.09 Meaningfulness 72.44 62.20 66.76
P2 Familiarity 84.27 81.57 82.77 Concreteness 85.24 81.51 83.17 Simplicity 84.51 87.16 85.98 Meaningfulness 82.20 88.49 85.68
P3 Familiarity 53.44 53.06 53.23 Concreteness 65.85 62.47 63.98 Simplicity 72.80 74.02 73.48 Meaningfulness 64.12 66.82 65.62
P4 Familiarity 42.32 35.86 38.74 Concreteness 58.90 54.71 56.58 Simplicity 61.83 59.35 60.46 Meaningfulness 59.51 59.06 59.26
P5 Familiarity 50.24 40.98 45.11 Concreteness 61.22 59.12 60.05 Simplicity 64.51 62.51 63.40 Meaningfulness 62.93 65.73 64.48
P6 Familiarity 47.32 43.00 44.92 Concreteness 51.71 54.35 53.17 Simplicity 59.76 58.31 58.96 Meaningfulness 55.85 58.80 57.49
W1 Familiarity 51.12 21.86 34.90 Concreteness 58.05 36.92 46.34 Simplicity 75.12 58.10 65.68 Meaningfulness 63.90 48.84 55.55
W2 Familiarity 21.24 19.59 20.33 Concreteness 26.46 23.27 24.70 Simplicity 58.90 61.06 60.10 Meaningfulness 34.27 37.25 35.92
W3 Familiarity 67.07 52.16 58.80 Concreteness 74.51 69.24 71.59 Simplicity 72.56 70.41 71.37 Meaningfulness 73.90 73.37 73.61
W4 Familiarity 49.20 39.43 43.78 Concreteness 59.88 55.71 57.57 Simplicity 57.56 58.06 57.84 Meaningfulness 59.15 59.59 59.39
W5 Familiarity 54.15 42.45 47.66 Concreteness 66.34 61.96 63.91 Simplicity 62.44 60.25 61.23 Meaningfulness 66.34 65.65 65.96
(continued )
Table AI. Summary of subjective ratings for each sign
IMDS 111,9
1508
Group Sign Sign features RSO NRSO All participants
W6 Familiarity 49.02 44.16 46.33 Concreteness 64.02 63.35 63.65 Simplicity 62.68 64.12 63.48 Meaningfulness 67.07 70.20 68.80
W7 Familiarity 49.68 44.75 46.95 Concreteness 61.34 65.47 63.63 Simplicity 63.29 62.22 62.70 Meaningfulness 65.12 70.75 68.24
W8 Familiarity 58.83 43.59 50.38 Concreteness 65.37 59.92 62.35 Simplicity 67.68 61.39 64.20 Meaningfulness 69.15 66.98 67.95
W9 Familiarity 42.32 34.37 37.91 Concreteness 56.46 54.96 55.63 Simplicity 60.24 55.18 57.43 Meaningfulness 60.85 60.51 60.66
W10 Familiarity 43.46 36.67 39.70 Concreteness 58.78 56.18 57.34 Simplicity 62.44 58.12 60.04 Meaningfulness 60.85 57.71 59.11
W11 Familiarity 36.27 34.33 35.20 Concreteness 39.39 42.82 41.29 Simplicity 53.54 55.10 54.40 Meaningfulness 44.63 50.67 47.98
W12 Familiarity 63.66 38.92 49.95 Concreteness 67.80 58.75 62.78 Simplicity 71.46 59.71 64.95 Meaningfulness 69.76 64.24 66.70
W13 Familiarity 51.22 40.98 45.54 Concreteness 65.61 63.73 64.57 Simplicity 69.02 61.31 64.75 Meaningfulness 69.51 67.88 68.61
W14 Familiarity 59.51 40.25 48.84 Concreteness 68.41 63.84 65.88 Simplicity 67.80 63.53 65.43 Meaningfulness 71.10 71.45 71.29
W15 Familiarity 36.95 26.24 31.01 Concreteness 42.80 42.86 42.84 Simplicity 45.98 43.39 44.54 Meaningfulness 47.32 50.96 49.34
W16 Familiarity 47.80 32.78 39.48 Concreteness 51.46 47.02 49.00 Simplicity 56.10 51.35 53.47 Meaningfulness 53.17 54.53 53.92
M1 Familiarity 79.27 71.69 75.07 Concreteness 85.37 83.10 84.11 Simplicity 83.90 82.59 83.17 Meaningfulness 85.22 87.02 86.22
(continued ) Table AI.
Understanding industrial
safety signs
1509
Group Sign Sign features RSO NRSO All participants
M2 Familiarity 59.15 48.45 53.22 Concreteness 65.85 58.84 61.97 Simplicity 67.44 65.27 66.24 Meaningfulness 68.29 64.43 66.15
M3 Familiarity 70.85 47.16 57.72 Concreteness 74.02 67.16 70.22 Simplicity 75.37 64.57 69.38 Meaningfulness 77.07 74.22 75.49
M4 Familiarity 43.54 40.69 41.96 Concreteness 51.59 58.98 55.68 Simplicity 54.27 69.41 62.66 Meaningfulness 54.24 63.24 59.23
M5 Familiarity 73.78 54.78 63.25 Concreteness 73.78 71.92 72.75 Simplicity 74.51 69.25 71.60 Meaningfulness 76.95 76.53 76.72
M6 Familiarity 49.88 33.88 41.01 Concreteness 56.95 51.35 53.85 Simplicity 64.88 58.27 61.22 Meaningfulness 65.12 56.71 60.46
M7 Familiarity 60.00 42.71 50.41 Concreteness 92.07 63.14 76.03 Simplicity 72.56 65.27 68.52 Meaningfulness 70.78 64.45 67.27
G1 Familiarity 73.78 70.49 71.96 Concreteness 70.98 73.18 72.20 Simplicity 75.46 77.37 76.52 Meaningfulness 78.66 79.90 79.35Table AI.
IMDS 111,9
1510
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
