Assessing safety culture in the energy industry: empirical validation of the SCEQ-E

• The SCEQ-E demonstrated acceptable internal consistency and strong factorial validity, supporting its reliability as a diagnostic tool. • Factor analyses confirmed a three-factor structure: Strategic decisions, HR practices, and daily behaviors. • This study distinguishes enacted safety culture from safety climate, supporting their empirical separation. • The SCEQ-E extends a nuclear-origin model into a cross-sector instrument for broader energy applications. This paper presents the adaptation and empirical validation of a tool to assess safety culture enactment in the energy sector. The Safety Culture Enactment Questionnaire-Energy (SCEQ-E) is an adapted version of the SCEQ (De Castro et al., 2017), originally developed for the nuclear industry and validated in Spanish. The SCEQ-E extends this instrument to the broader energy industry and was administered to employees working in different energy organizations (N = 146). The original questionnaire was translated into English, adapted to the energy sector, and reviewed by industry experts. Exploratory factor analysis supported a three-factor structure and two items were removed due to cross-loadings. Confirmatory factor analysis provided support for the proposed three-factor model, showing acceptable model fit and strong internal consistency for the total scale and subscales. The SCEQ-E also demonstrated good convergent validity and evidence of discriminant validity in relation to safety climate. Overall, the results indicate that the SCEQ-E provides initial evidence of reliability and construct validity and represents a promising instrument for assessing safety culture enactment in the energy industry, although further validation using larger and more diverse samples is warranted.