Developing a Safety Culture Index for Construction Projects in Developing Countries: A Proposed Fuzzy Synthetic Evaluation Approach

The establishment of a construction safety culture index is of specific significance as it offers an objective measurement of the status of safety culture on construction projects. Considering the dynamics and complexities in the construction industry, the safety culture on a project may differ from other projects. This paper formulates a safety culture index to quantify the level of safety culture on construction projects in developing countries using the fuzzy synthetic approach (fuzzy set theory). The safety culture index consists of six safety culture categories; these include management commitment, accountability, worker involvement, supervisory leadership, communication, safety education and training. Professionals in developing countries can use the safety culture index to objectively determine the status of safety culture in a more practical way. In addition, application of the safety culture index would be useful to efficiently and factually compare the relative safety culture levels of different projects for benchmarking purposes.