The Role of Philosophical Foundations in Enhancing Public Safety Culture in Vocational Workshops at Vocational Secondary Schools: Vocational Education Teachers' Perspectives

This paper develops an experimental research model to investigate whether philosophy-informed professional development for vocational education teachers could strengthen teacher-perceived safety culture and safety-related decision making in secondary-school vocational workshops. The proposed intervention integrates an ethics-of-care orientation, human dignity and rights, pragmatist inquiry, critical dialogue, and reflective constructivist learning across eight weeks. The prospective design is a matched-pair cluster-randomized controlled pretest–posttest study involving 16 schools (eight matched school pairs) and 128 teachers (64 in each condition). Two newly specified measures are provided: a 24-item Teacher-Perceived Workshop Safety Culture Scale (1–5) and a 12-scenario Safety Decision-Making Test (0–12). To illustrate analysis rather than report observed effects, a fully synthetic dataset was generated with a fixed random seed and evaluated using pair-level difference-in-differences, exact sign-flip tests, teacher-level baseline-adjusted models with school-clustered standard errors, reliability checks, and exploratory domain comparisons. In the simulated example, the intervention-minus-control difference in mean culture-score change was 0.577 points, 95% CI [0.472, 0.682], t(7) = 12.95; the difference in scenario-score change was 2.406 points, 95% CI [1.840, 2.972], t(7) = 10.05. Exact two-sided pairwise sign-flip p values were .0078 for both outcomes (Holm-adjusted exact p = .0156 for each). These values are properties of the simulation, not evidence of a real intervention. The manuscript provides the complete research logic, instruments, implementation timetable, statistical code, and 40 recent, traceable references to support a future ethically approved field trial.