Prioritizing Critical Risk Factors for Scaffolding Operations: An Expert-Based Analytic Hierarchy Process Study in Taiwan

Scaffolding is a common temporary facility in construction projects, yet accidents such as workers falling from heights, falling objects injuring people, or scaffold collapse continue to occur. These incidents are linked to different underlying causes, including factors related to personnel, work activities, and the environment. Although existing studies have identified numerous risk factors from past scaffolding accidents, their relative importance remains unclear, making it difficult to allocate limited management resources to the higher-priority potential hazards. This study first confirmed widely recognized and common scaffold-related potential risk factors from existing literature, regulations, and accident casualty reports, then invited experts to review and revise the candidate factors, and finally used the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to rank the ultimately selected key factors. The results indicate that, among the importance rankings of the five major dimensions, management factors and personnel factors are the top two dimensions with nearly identical weights. They are followed, in order, by work-method factors, equipment factors, and environmental factors, which received relatively smaller weights. Methodologically, the study provides an integrated scaffold-specific framework that consolidates heterogeneous personnel, management, work-method, equipment, and environmental risks into a common structure for quantitative prioritization. Practically, the resulting global weights can support risk-based allocation of limited safety resources by guiding the relative emphasis placed on scaffold inspection, worker training, cross-trade coordination, and routine safety management.