A focus group study on the importance of occupational safety culture in terms of occupational health and safety

Ergonomic design of the working environment in terms of health and safety, minimizing the risks by determining the risk factors, the existence of legal and institutional regulations are the basic elements to ensure occupational health and safety. However, these measures to be taken are not sufficient to prevent work accidents. At this point, the safety culture, which emphasizes the importance of the "human" factor in preventing work accidents and ensuring health and safety in the working environment, has a very critical role. Having all the employees at a work place to adopt this safety culture and expanding it to all levels will bring along a safer working environment. Accordingly, this study aims to determine the safety culture levels by revealing the opinions of the people working in the carpentry profession which is categorized in the dangerous work class on the job safety culture. In this context, focus group interview and observation method which are the qualitative research methods were used. The interviews were held with 24 carpenters working in Erzincan and content analysis method was used as data analysis method. According to the findings, the participants were generally found to have low levels of safety culture and only the fatalism perception, one of the security culture determinants, had a positive effect on the level of safety culture. In addition, it was observed that there weren’t any conscious practices to identify and prevent the risk factors (especially physical and ergonomic risk factors).