Design of safety warnings and risk perception inducement: a comparative study between safety signs and safety comics in construction workplaces

Abstract

Purpose

Safety warnings remind construction workers about dangers and guide them to take necessary actions to avoid potential injuries, which could encourage their safe behavior. Workers’ behavior compliance with the safety warnings would be impacted by the risk perception levels induced by the warnings. This study aims to examine whether the design of safety warnings would impact the induced risk perception of workers

Design/methodology/approach

This study compared the risk perception levels of construction workers when processing two forms of safety warnings, i.e., safety signs and safety comics, which are commonly used in construction workplaces. Construction workers (n = 20) volunteered for an experiment with an implicit paradigm to probe how they perceive these safety warnings, using event-related potentials (ERPs) features collected by an electroencephalogram (EEG) sensor to indicate the risk perception level

Findings

The results demonstrated that the design of safety warnings would impact the induced risk perception. The safety signs and safety comics performed differently in inducing the workers’ risk perception. The safety signs representing prohibition and caution warnings induced significantly higher risk perception than the comics, and there were no significant differences regarding direction warnings

Originality/value

This is the first study to compare the risk perception levels between various forms of safety warnings presenting safety information in different ways. The findings would help to expand the knowledge of the relationship between the design of safety warnings and workers’ safety behavioral compliance

Citation

Ouyang, Y., Huang, G. and He, S. (2024), "Design of safety warnings and risk perception inducement: a comparative study between safety signs and safety comics in construction workplaces", Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/ECAM-01-2024-0077