Comparison of safety performances of students, construction workers and engineers in virtual safety training :|an evaluation of using students as surrogates

Abstract

Construction safety is considered as a global concern with its high rates of fatal and non-fatal occupational accidents reported every year in the world. Construction safety trainings are proven to be one of the most powerful method to minimize these high rates. However, current safety implementations are found as insufficient and ineffective in terms of increasing the safety awareness and safety knowledge of construction workers. Therefore, more effective approaches should be adopted to enhance the safety trainings and implementations. In this regard, virtual reality has been recently applied in different kinds of safety trainings and has made significant contributions in terms of occupational safety. In the development stages of such training tools, although the target group is construction workers or engineers, students are mainly preferred as subject groups due to time, money and location considerations. This thesis aims to investigate the appropriateness of using students as surrogates for construction workers and for engineers in the development of virtual safety training tools. To be able to achieve the aim of the thesis, the newly developed V-SAFE v.2 training tool, which covers the basic scaffolding tasks coupled with relevant health and safety implementations, is adopted in the experiments. In this regard, the effectiveness of the tool on students, construction workers and engineers are also evaluated appropriately. Lastly, safety performances of the construction workers on V-SAFE v.2 are evaluated considering their diverse backgrounds.