Safety climate in the Ghanaian printing industry

Primary data was gathered from micro, small, medium and large-scale printing companies, from Accra and Kumasi. A forty-five-item Safety Climate Scale with a seven-dimension ques- tionnaire: Safety Climate Scale for Manufacturing Industry (SCSMI), developed by Ghahra- mani and Khalkhali [43], was adopted and used in obtaining data from the population. Although the original items in the scale did not change, we added demographic variables to obtain data to test the hypotheses. The SCSMI comprises the following dimensions and the number of items included under each one: 1. Safety commitment and communication (16 items), 2. Safety involvement and training (8 items), 3. Positive safety practices (8 items), 4. Safety competency (3 items), 5. Safety procedures (4 items), 6. Accountability and responsibility (3 items), 7. Supportive environment (3 items). The assessment of the major fit indices of the SCSMI shows the dimensional structure of the safety climate scale was satisfactory, and good data fit for the study. The reliability value for the 45-item scale was 0.96. This means that the survey measures the safety climate and predicts important outcomes, such as injuries. The internal consistency reliability of the safety climate components showed that the scale is appropriate for the current study. We obtained permission from the owners of the presses, and respondents voluntarily gave consent to take part in the survey. Two hundred (200) questionnaires were administered to randomly selected workers drawn from the pre-press, press and post-press sections of the

printing presses. 172 questionnaires were correctly completed and returned. A majority (76) representing 44.2% of the respondents, were from the press section. The inclusion and exclusion criteria for the study were that, first, the organisations were registered members of the Ghana Printers and Paper Converters Association, the willingness of respondents to participate and the workers were full-time employees. Also, participants were drawn from Accra and Kumasi; two industrialised cities with the majority of printing companies. Other printing companies outside these two cities were excluded from the study. We received written ethical approval from the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Committee of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi Ghana, to carry out this research. Analysis of results Mean and standard deviation, two basic statistical measurements were used to summarize the Likert-scale survey data. We introduce the Mean safety climate score (MSCS) which represents the average value on the Likert scale for all safety items to help evaluate the weak and strong perceptions regarding safety. The mathematical mean for the scale 1-2-3-4-5 is 3.0. So, in prin- ciple, results over 3.0 are positive or strong. Further, an independent t-test and analysis of vari- ance (ANOVAs) were used to test the association between demographic characteristics and perceptions of safety climate, as measured by dimensions 1–7 in the SCSMI-45 survey. Table 1 indicates the estimated power for a one-sample mean test. The estimated power

assumed for the study is one (1) which is strong enough to reject the null hypotheses, assuming that the alternative hypotheses are true. PLOS ONE Safety climate in the printing industry PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278100 November 28, 2022 5 / 15