An item-response theory approach to safety climate measurement: The Liberty Mutual Safety Climate Short Scales

- This study shortened the original Zohar and Luria (2005) 32-item safety climate scale which is widely used in the scientific and practical field.
- Item response theory (IRT) analysis was conducted using a sample of 29,179 frontline workers from various industries.
- Two lengths of shortened scales were developed in the study which had good reliability and high correlation with the original scale scores.
- The shortened scales will be valuable for academic research and practical survey implementation in improving occupational safety.

Zohar and Luria's (2005) safety climate (SC) scale, measuring organization- and group- level SC each with 16 items, is widely used in research and practice. To improve the utility of the SC scale, we shortened the original full-length SC scales. Item response theory (IRT) analysis was conducted using a sample of 29,179 frontline workers from various industries. Based on graded response models, we shortened the original scales in two ways: (1) selecting items with above-average discriminating ability (i.e. offering more than 6.25% of the original total scale information), resulting in 8-item organization-level and 11-item group-level SC scales; and (2) selecting the most informative items that together retain at least 30% of original scale information, resulting in 4-item organization-level and 4-item group-level SC scales. All four shortened scales had acceptable reliability (≥0.89) and high correlations (≥0.95) with the original scale scores. The shortened scales will be valuable for academic research and practical survey implementation in improving occupational safety.