The Application of Social Network Analysis in the Construction Industry of Hong Kong

Book of 1st International Conference on Emerging Trends in Engineering, Management & Sciences, City University of Science & Information Technology (CUSIT), Islamabad, Pakistan, p. 31. This file was downloaded from: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/80109/ c © Copyright 2014 [please consult the author] Notice: Changes introduced as a result of publishing processes such as copy-editing and formatting may not be reflected in this document. For a definitive version of this work, please refer to the published source: First International Conference on Emerging Trends in Engineering, Management and Sciences, December 28-30, 2014 (ICETEMS-2014) Peshawar, Pakistan The Application of Social Network Analysis in the Construction Industry of Hong Kong Albert P.C. CHAN Professor, Building and Real Estate Department, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China, Email: [email protected] Arshad Ali JAVED Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Building and Real Estate Department, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China, Correspond to: [email protected] Francis K.W. WONG Professor, Building and Real Estate Department, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China, Email: [email protected] Carol K.H. HON Lecturer, School of Civil Engineering and Built Environment, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane Qld 4001, Australia, Email: [email protected] Hafiz ZAHOOR PhD Candidate, Building and Real Estate Department, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China, Email: [email protected] Sainan LYU Research Assistant, Building and Real Estate Department, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China, Email: [email protected] Abstract The Hong Kong construction industry is currently facing ageing problem and labour shortage. There are opportunities for employing ethnic minority construction workers to join this hazardous industry. These ethnic minority workers are prone to accidents due to communication barriers. Safety communication is playing an important role for avoiding the accidents on construction sites. However, the ethnic minority workers are not very fluent in the local language and facing safety communication problems while working with local workers. Social network analysis (SNA), being an effective tool to identify the safety communication flow on the construction site, is used to attain the measures of safety communication like centrality, density and betweenness within the ethnic minorities and local workers, and to generate sociograms that visually represent communication pattern within the effective and ineffective safety networks. The aim of this paper is to present the application of SNA for improving the safety communication of ethnic minorities in the construction industry of Hong Kong. The paper provides the theoretical background of SNA approaches for the data collection and analysis using the software UCINET and NetDraw, to determine the predominant safety communication network structure and pattern of ethnic minorities on site.The Hong Kong construction industry is currently facing ageing problem and labour shortage. There are opportunities for employing ethnic minority construction workers to join this hazardous industry. These ethnic minority workers are prone to accidents due to communication barriers. Safety communication is playing an important role for avoiding the accidents on construction sites. However, the ethnic minority workers are not very fluent in the local language and facing safety communication problems while working with local workers. Social network analysis (SNA), being an effective tool to identify the safety communication flow on the construction site, is used to attain the measures of safety communication like centrality, density and betweenness within the ethnic minorities and local workers, and to generate sociograms that visually represent communication pattern within the effective and ineffective safety networks. The aim of this paper is to present the application of SNA for improving the safety communication of ethnic minorities in the construction industry of Hong Kong. The paper provides the theoretical background of SNA approaches for the data collection and analysis using the software UCINET and NetDraw, to determine the predominant safety communication network structure and pattern of ethnic minorities on site.