Critical Factors Affecting the Safety Communication of Ethnic Minority Construction Workers

Ethnic minority workers (EMWs) or migrant workers continue to be confronted with communication problems, which can have serious effects on safety outcomes. This study aims to help improve construction industry EMW safety communication by uncovering and analyzing the criticality, underlying constructs, and explanatory power of the influencing factors involved. A mixed research design was employed by combining a literature review, semistructured interviews, and a questionnaire survey. Following the identification of an initial set of safety communication factors (SCFs) and a questionnaire designed and administered to EMWs in the Hong Kong and Australian construction industry, a total of 134 valid responses were analyzed through mean scoring, factor analysis, and importance-explanation analysis. Eighteen critical EMW SCFs are identified and categorized into three groups of worker-related SCFs, manager-related SCFs, and organization-related SCFs. A set of 36 SCFs identified cannot only be used to examine the relative importance of EMW SCFs, but can also be adopted to capture the critical SCFs for both local and ethnic minority construction workers in other countries. Narrowing a wide range of SCFs for EMWs provides stakeholders with the insights needed to the key contributory factors of safety communication, which in turn has a positive impact on safety performance. Despite this study being conducted in Hong Kong and Australia, its findings can also be used as a reference for other countries where EMWs are employed (e.g., the US, the UK, Canada, the Middle East, Malaysia, Singapore, and South Africa). Practical Applications Safety communication is a major safety challenge for EMWs and effective safety communication leads to improved safety performance and decreased injuries and fatalities. This research provides extra information on the key issues of safety communication that associated stakeholders need to address for EMWs to help them understand and mitigate the main safety communication barriers. This study suggests that apart from some measures (e.g., language courses, understandable safety training and safety materials, and bilingual translators) that have been taken for improving EMW safety communication in many countries, governments and employers are recommended to adopt multifaceted strategies manipulating worker-, manager-, and organization-related SCFs that would be more effective than a single measure. The critical roles of managers and organizations in promoting EMW safety communication are also emphasized in this study. Future efforts to improve or develop programs or interventions for EMW safety communication can benefit from this study by referring to the critical SCFs to include each aspect of safety communication. Furthermore, the identified critical SCFs will also help industry practitioners diagnose deficiencies in EMW safety management practices.</p

Improving the safety communication of ethnic minority workers in the construction industry

This study aims to improve the safety communication of ethnic minority workers (EMWs) in the construction industry. A mixed methods research design was adopted. Semi-structured interviews, Delphi survey and questionnaire surveys were conducted to examine safety and health problems of EMWs, critical safety communication factors, safety communication networks of EM crews, and the effects of safety communication factors and networks on the safety performance of EMWs. The research findings would help industry practitioners to diagnose deficiencies in safety communication management with EMWs, develop effective communication network patterns for EMWs, and improve the safety performance of EMWs

The application of social network analysis in the construction industry of Hong Kong

The Hong Kong construction industry is currently facing ageing problem and labour shortage. There are opportunities for employing ethnic minority construction workers to join this hazardous industry. These ethnic minority workers are prone to accidents due to communication barriers. Safety communication is playing an important role for avoiding the accidents on construction sites. However, the ethnic minority workers are not very fluent in the local language and facing safety communication problems while working with local workers. Social network analysis (SNA), being an effective tool to identify the safety communication flow on the construction site, is used to attain the measures of safety communication like centrality, density and betweenness within the ethnic minorities and local workers, and to generate sociograms that visually represent communication pattern within the effective and ineffective safety networks. The aim of this paper is to present the application of SNA for improving the safety communication of ethnic minorities in the construction industry of Hong Kong. The paper provides the theoretical background of SNA approaches for the data collection and analysis using the software UCINET and NetDraw, to determine the predominant safety communication network structure and pattern of ethnic minorities on site

Spatiotemporal Evolution and Influencing Factors for Urban Resilience in China: A Provincial Analysis

In the current era, as modern cities increasingly face environmental disasters and inherent challenges, the creation and enhancement of resilient cities have become critical. China’s urban resilience exhibits significant imbalances and inadequacies at the provincial level. This study delves into the evolution of urban resilience in various Chinese provinces, offering valuable insights for building and nurturing resilient cities. Initially, a comprehensive evaluation system for China’s urban resilience was established, incorporating 24 indicators across three key resilience aspects: resistance, adaptability, and recovery. The entropy weight method was used to develop an urban resilience evaluation model, and the Moran index and spatial cold–hot-spot analysis were applied to examine the spatiotemporal dynamics of urban resilience across China’s 31 provinces from 2012 to 2021. Moreover, the geographically and temporally weighted regression model was employed to analyze the spatial distribution of factors affecting urban resilience. The results show a general upward trend in urban resilience across Chinese provinces, with notable regional differences and concentrations. A significant decrease in urban resilience is observed from southeastern coastal cities to inland regions. The regression model highlights spatial variations in the impact of different factors, with the same factor having varying effects in different provinces. This research provides a thorough understanding of the factors influencing urban resilience in China, contributing to both theoretical and practical discussions on the topic. It lays a strong scientific groundwork for the development and advancement of resilient cities in China

A Comprehensive Bibliometric Analysis of Urban Renewal Research during 2012–2022

Rapid urban development has promoted economic development, but it has also created social problems. Urban renewal provides an important means of achieving sustainable urban development. After 2012, it became a research hotspot with people-oriented and organic renewal concepts. To understand the research trends in urban renewal during 2012–2022, a comprehensive bibliometric analysis was conducted to identify research progress, fields, hotspots, and trends. The core collection is based on the Web of Science (WoS) database, with a total of 2692 publications. The volume of publications, journal of publication, country, institution, research scope, and keywords were selected as the object of analysis. The results reveal that since 2012, the volume of urban renewal articles has been gradually increasing, reaching a maximum of 417 in 2022. China is the largest and most influential country in terms of the number of articles published, but the cooperation between institutions and authors is not strong. The research hotspots can be summarized as the connotation and practice of urban renewal, approaches to urban renewal, and sustainable urban development. Future directions for research are identified as including an innovative multi-corporate governance model, community-based renewal, further exploration of sustainable renewal practices, and interdisciplinary applications of urban renewal

A Decision Method for Construction Safety Risk Management Based on Ontology and Improved CBR: Example of a Subway Project

Early decision-making and the prevention of construction safety risks are very important for the safety, quality, and cost of construction projects. In the field of construction safety risk management, in the face of a loose, chaotic, and huge information environments, how to design an efficient construction safety risk management decision support method has long been the focus of academic research. An effective approach to safety management is to structuralize safety risk knowledge, then identify and reuse it, and establish a scientific and systematic construction safety risk management decision system. Based on ontology and improved case-based reasoning (CBR) methods, this paper proposes a decision-making approach for construction safety risk management in which the reasoning process is improved by integrating a similarity algorithm and correlation algorithm. Compared to the traditional CBR approach in which only the similarity of information is considered, this method can avoid missing important correlated information by making inferences from multiple sources of information. Finally, the method is applied to the safety risks of subway construction for verification to show that the method is effective and easy to implement.</p

Review of the Application of Wearable Devices in Construction Safety: A Bibliometric Analysis from 2005 to 2021

Wearable devices as an emerging technology to collect safety data on construction site is gaining increasing attention from researchers and practitioners. Given the rapid development of wearable devices research and the high application prospects of wearable devices in construction safety, a state-of-the-art review of research and implementations in this field is needed. The aim of this study is to provide an objective and extensive bibliometric analysis of the published articles on wearable applications in construction safety for the period of 2005&ndash;2021. CiteSpace software was used to conduct co-citation analysis, co-occurrence analysis, and cluster identification on 169 identified articles. The results show that 10 research clusters (e.g., attentional failure, brain-computer interface) were extremely important in the development of wearable devices for construction safety. The results highlight the evolution of wearable devices in construction-safety-related research, revealing the underlying structure of this cross-cutting research area. The analysis also summarizes the status quo of wearable devices in the construction safety field and provides a dynamic platform for integrating future applications

Review of the Application of Wearable Devices in Construction Safety: A Bibliometric Analysis from 2005 to 2021

Wearable devices as an emerging technology to collect safety data on construction site is gaining increasing attention from researchers and practitioners. Given the rapid development of wearable devices research and the high application prospects of wearable devices in construction safety, a state-of-the-art review of research and implementations in this field is needed. The aim of this study is to provide an objective and extensive bibliometric analysis of the published articles on wearable applications in construction safety for the period of 2005–2021. CiteSpace software was used to conduct co-citation analysis, co-occurrence analysis, and cluster identification on 169 identified articles. The results show that 10 research clusters (e.g., attentional failure, brain-computer interface) were extremely important in the development of wearable devices for construction safety. The results highlight the evolution of wearable devices in construction-safety-related research, revealing the underlying structure of this cross-cutting research area. The analysis also summarizes the status quo of wearable devices in the construction safety field and provides a dynamic platform for integrating future applications

Using evolutionary game theory to study construction safety supervisory mechanism in China

Purpose: In China, external supervision on construction safety mainly comes from the government and supervision engineers (SEs). However, the construction safety supervisory mechanism (CSSM) contains some dilemmas affecting the improvement of safety performance, such as the declining impact of SEs, the increasing rent-seeking behaviors of contractor and excessive government interference. This study aims to depict and analyze the CSSM in China from an evolutionary game view. The objectives are to understand the supervision strategy and evolutionary behaviors of different stakeholders, propose suggestions for improving safety performance and help the key safety supervision stakeholders, especially the government, formulate a suitable safety supervision strategy. Design/methodology/approach: This research uses tripartite dynamic evolutionary game theory to study the CSSM in China and solve the stable equilibrium solution using system dynamics. Findings: This study has revealed the game relationship of construction safety supervision mechanisms in China and solved the stable equilibrium solution. The results prove that a supervision engineer (SE) plays a crucial role in the CSSM, and “supervision engineer useless” is an unreasonable assertion. For government supervision agency (GSA), excessive inspection and free-market regulation are neither wise strategies. GSA can reduce the inspection frequency when general contractors (GCs) input high safety investments and SEs implement responsible supervision. But keeping proper government supervision to avoid GC's unlawful behaviors and SE's rent-seeking is indispensable. In addition, excessive governmental supervision will weaken SE's role, so the government should transfer some supervision powers to SE. Originality/value: This study focuses on the dynamic evolution process between GSA, GC and SE. This method is different from most research that neglected the dynamic characteristic of system and game solution stability. The research methods not only contribute to construction safety supervision policy-making in China but also help to improve supervision efficiency in other countries and other fields.</p