Factors associated with the severity of construction accidents: The case of South Australia

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Author(s)
Dumrak, J
Mostafa, S
Kamardeen, I
Rameezdeen, R
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2013
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While the causes of accidents in the construction industry have been extensively studied, severity remains an understudied area. In order to provide more evidence for the currently limited number of empirical investigations on severity, this study analysed 24,764 construction accidents reported during 2002-11 in South Australia. A conceptual model developed through literature uses personal characteristics such as age, experience, gender and language. It also employs work-related factors such as size of organization, project size and location, mechanism of accident and body location of the injury. These were shown to discriminate ...
View more >While the causes of accidents in the construction industry have been extensively studied, severity remains an understudied area. In order to provide more evidence for the currently limited number of empirical investigations on severity, this study analysed 24,764 construction accidents reported during 2002-11 in South Australia. A conceptual model developed through literature uses personal characteristics such as age, experience, gender and language. It also employs work-related factors such as size of organization, project size and location, mechanism of accident and body location of the injury. These were shown to discriminate why some accidents result in only a minor severity while others are fatal. Factors such as time of accident, day of the week and season were not strongly associated with accident severity. When the factors affecting severity of an accident are well understood, preventive measures could be developed specifically to those factors that are at high risk.
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View more >While the causes of accidents in the construction industry have been extensively studied, severity remains an understudied area. In order to provide more evidence for the currently limited number of empirical investigations on severity, this study analysed 24,764 construction accidents reported during 2002-11 in South Australia. A conceptual model developed through literature uses personal characteristics such as age, experience, gender and language. It also employs work-related factors such as size of organization, project size and location, mechanism of accident and body location of the injury. These were shown to discriminate why some accidents result in only a minor severity while others are fatal. Factors such as time of accident, day of the week and season were not strongly associated with accident severity. When the factors affecting severity of an accident are well understood, preventive measures could be developed specifically to those factors that are at high risk.
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Journal Title
Australasian Journal of Construction Economics and Building
Volume
13
Issue
4
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2013. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Subject
Civil engineering
Building
Building not elsewhere classified
Applied economics