Development and validation of a safety climate scale for United Arab Emirates oil and gas industries

Abstract

This study aims to develop and validate a safety climate scale for United Arab Emirates (UAE) oil and gas industries to enhance the process safety performance. This study was performed at the Abu Dhabi Oil National Company (ADNOC) in the UAE. Principal component analysis was used to analyze the response data, resulting in the identification of five safety climate dimensions. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was then performed to test the relationships among the constructs of safety climate dimensions as conceptualized in a measurement model. Finally, a structural model was developed to measure the significance of these five safety climate dimensions in the oil and gas industries in the UAE. This paper confirms the importance of measuring and incorporating multiple factors comprehensively to obtain a complete picture of the implementation and perceptions of safety climate in oil and gas companies in the UAE. It also provides a reliable and validated instrument and first- and second-order models for measuring the safety climate dimensions, which affect the performance of safety in general, and process safety, which is specifically useful for informing practitioner regarding focus area to enhance safety performance.