Measuring Safety Culture in the Australian Regional Airline Industry: the Development of the Airline Safety Culture Index (asci)

The recognition of the integral role that human and organisational factors play in accident causation has led to a recent focus on identifying the elements that best represent safety culture. However, previous attempts to measure safety culture have produced disparate results and have been criticised for a lack of theoretical grounding. Subsequently the aims of the present study were, to develop a safety culture instrument as a means of evaluating the usefulness of an airline safety management program called INDICATE, and to provide the airline industry with a practical tool to regularly measure safety culture. A 25 item self administered questionnaire was developed, based upon previous measures, and distributed to 150 regional airline employees on three separate occasions over a 16 month period. Factor analysis revealed the predominance of one factor labelled safety information with a second more moderate factor labelled safety reporting. In an effort to develop a brief scale for further application, items with high item total correlation’s and factor loadings were retained. This 10-item scale was then distributed to 642 employees from 42 regional airlines of varying size. Again factor analysis revealed one dominant factor which consisted of items comprising the previous safety information factor. Results indicated that the necessary conditions for creating a good safety culture involve ensuring that employees are knowledgeable about current company safety issues and are given sufficient opportunity to voice any safety concerns. The results also suggested that smaller size airlines appear to have a better safety culture than larger operators and that safety culture is a useful measure to determine the effectiveness, over time, of a safety management program.