Can belief structures improve our understanding of safety climate survey data?

• The data collected with a safety climate survey were modeled as belief structures.
• A number of combination rules are investigated for the purpose of data aggregation.
• Illustrative examples are used to demonstrate the limitations and suitability of the different combinations rules.

Questionnaire-based surveys are a standard method used for assessing the safety climate within an organization. However, their analysis – in particular data aggregation – poses several challenges, among which are subjective judgment, incompleteness and uncertainty. This paper explores the use of approaches based on belief structures for aggregating data from safety climate questionnaires. Data relevant to this study were collected through a questionnaire administered to the employees of a nuclear research centre. The results show that, while belief structures may offer a promising way to represent data collected from questionnaires, the existing aggregation methods are not always adequate. Averaging schemes applied to belief structures seem the most suited – among the methods investigated – in the specific problem context analyzed. The analysis of the survey data shows the limitations of quantitative approaches for safety culture assessment and the need to always complement these with in-depth qualitative analysis.