Evaluating Safety Competency of Construction Special Operations Workers: An Integrated Multimethod Approach with Eye-Tracking Validation

Construction special operations are characterized by high risks and severe accident consequences. Deficiencies in safety competency are a key factor triggering workers’ unsafe acts, making the establishment of a scientific evaluation model crucial for accident prevention. However, current safety competency evaluations for special operations workers face issues such as incomplete indicator systems, singular evaluation methods, and lack of objectivity. This study adopts a safety cognition perspective to preliminarily identify elements through literature review, accident causation analysis, and job analysis. Integrating literature research and questionnaire surveys, we constructed an evaluation system comprising 22 indicators across five dimensions: risk perception, risk comprehension, perceptual response, selective response, and behavioral execution. The interpretive structural model was employed to clarify hierarchical relationships among indicators, the analytic network process to determine weights, and an improved matter-element extension model to establish the evaluation framework. Finally, a case study involving three special operations workers from a Chinese project validated the system’s effectiveness and scientific rigor through questionnaires, peer interviews, and eye-tracking experiments. The results indicate that (1) all three workers exhibited an overall “relatively strong” safety competency level, yet with dimensional variations; and (2) the model successfully evaluates safety competency and differentiates workers’ capability disparities across dimensions. This research enriches construction safety competency theory and provides enterprises with scientific tools for worker selection, training, and safety management. It facilitates a shift from “passive postincident management” to “proactive prevention” in construction safety management, offering insights for global construction safety governance.