A clinical study of a group of accident-prone workers.

One of the many difficulties in the study of accident causation is to keep under detailed medical supervision a group of men exposed to constant risk who provide a sufficiently large number of apparently accident-prone individuals. At the end of 1944 the prospects of continued employment were good. In an area where there was little alternative employment available, 300 men, who in that year had sustained an undue number of accidents, were selected from a total population of 6,450 employed in an aircraft factory. It was felt, as accident proneness might not prove to be a stable quality, that as large a group as possible should be studied. Eighty-seven men of this group of 300 proved to be prone to accidents during the year 1945. This paper is concerned with the observations made on them and on a random sample of 100 other men from the same factory. Schilling (1954) in a brief review states: " From a number of investigations both Arbous and Kerrich (1951) and Ghiselli and Brown (1948) conclude that the low degree of consistency which exists between the accident rates ofindividual workmen for separate periods of time may be because the tendency to have accidents is an unstable trait. Much of the evidence of its stability is based on minor accident records. These may be unreliable indicators of accident proneness since some workers get almost every minor injury treated and others do not. Thus, recorded minor accidents may indicate a personal trait which is stable but not necessarily associated with accident proneness."