A FUZZY APPROACH TO EVALUATE THE EFFECTIVENESS OF SAFETY TRAINING

Safety training, over the last decades, has become a relevant topic, notably for its consequences on workers' health. Aiming to decrease injuries and occupational diseases, education and training could play an important role. Indeed, in most countries, companies are obliged to train their employees on safety skills and to maintain and reinforce those skills over the years. For example in Italy, the national regulation focuses on the issue that safety training should preferably be delivered with engaging practices. At the same time, companies are not obliged to evaluate the effectiveness of the training, resulting in the fact that delivering safety training does not lead to safer workplaces. In order to answer this matter, we conducted a longitudinal study in a training institute located in Northern Italy. Data were collected during a training course on 80 workers who attended a safety training course on safety skills in the construction sector. Most of them were male (94%), Italian (64%), have an average education level and have a full-time permanent contract (51%). The medium age was 39.8 years old (s.dev.=10.3) and the averaged tenure was 4.6 years (s. dev.=4.9). In order to define measures for the parameters of the model, an application of the fuzzy logic theory was adopted, thanks to its ability in facing uncertainty and vagueness, typical of human judgment and behaviour. The use of fuzzy logic in different aspects of safety has been discussed in a number of papers as it is a tool that provides a decision framework that incorporates imprecise judgments inherent in the evaluation process. In line with this, variables concerning safety (such as risk perception and safety attitudes) were related to the effectiveness of the training using a fuzzy logic, which is, to best of our knowledge, never been studied before in a safety educational context.