Safety Culture Onboard Ships

Abstract

A project focusing on identifying and describing maritime risks is being conducted in the heavily trafficked water area of the Sound, situated in northern Europe between Sweden and Denmark. This paper reports of a test of a first version of a questionnaire constructed for measuring safety culture onboard vessels. 48 crew members on a Swedish registered passenger/cargo ship completed and returned the questionnaire. The crew members were able to complete the questionnaire with few unanswered questions. Acceptable homogeneity was obtained for all but one of the nine dimensions of safety culture. Significant differences on several of the safety culture dimensions were found between deck/engine vs catering personnel, men vs women and different age groups, while little differences where found for supervisors vs non-supervisors or people with varying number of years onboard. Such safety culture dimensions need to be studied in relation to reports of accidents and near-misses, to further study the true relevance of safety culture.