The Effect of Work Experience on Risk Assessment Skills
(Room S320F)
27 Nov 18
2:00 PM
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2:30 PM
Identifying and assessing the risk of hazards is critical to avoiding accidents and injuries. However, studies indicate that workers have difficulty accurately assessing risk (Carter & Smith, 2006) and that there is a lot of variability in how people define and perceive risk (Perlman, Sacks, & Barak, 2014). Specifically, it has been reported that untrained workers tend to only consider severity as opposed to both the severity and probability of an accident occurring when assessing overall risk. Between the fourth quarter of 2013 through 2016, 72 mineworkers were fatally injured at metal/nonmetal mines in the United States (MSHA, 2017). A significant portion of these fatalities appear to be linked to a lack of task and site experience, with 22 fatalities involving mineworkers performing an activity with which they had less than one year experience, and 20 fatalities involving contractors. The focus of this research effort is to expand our understanding of how mineworkers with varied experience and employment backgrounds assess the risk of worksite hazards. Initially, researchers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) collected hazard recognition and risk assessment data from 24 mineworkers, 13 safety professionals, and 14 students while performing a simulated workplace examination in NIOSH Pittsburgh’s virtual immersion and simulation laboratory. Researchers then packaged four hazards from the laboratory study into a risk assessment training module, specifically looking at severity, probability, and overall risk. Researchers used the training module to collect risk assessment data from over 1,200 mineworkers during mandatory, annual refresher training. The training data collection provided a larger, more general sample that specifically included contractors. This paper compares risk assessments from the laboratory and training data, and it reports on the differences between risk components, groups, and experience in order to identify fut