Relationships between safety culture aspects – A work process to enable interpretation

Knowledge about the existing safety culture in a maritime organization such as in shipping companies or on board ships can enable the formulation of effective interventions to maintain and improve safety culture and safety in the organization. When assessing the safety culture, questionnaires developed for this purpose are often used. This paper proposes a work process that facilitates the analysis and interpretation of the relationships between safety culture aspects using questionnaire data. The work process includes the use of variable cluster analysis where the cluster solutions are presented in dendrograms. These were found to be an excellent way to visualize complex relationships in the quantitative data and to facilitate the understanding of the safety culture concept. Results are presented from applying the statistical process to safety culture data from six Swedish ships in international traffic. The visualized safety culture results can enable group discussions about safety on different organizational levels and can constitute an important input to the continuous improvement processes for safety and safety culture.