Development of Method to Measure Individual Hazard Perception Independent from Specific Knowledge and Experience

Simple and objective method to measure individual hazard perception is needed for an efficient safety-education and activities at workplace. If we can develop a method to measure individual hazard perception, it is thought that suggestions to improve education and training methods can be made. A method to measure hazard perception in traffic scenes was established in the past, however, as far as we know, this method cannot be applied to different fields. In previous researches, various authors investigated individual hazard perception. However, these methods couldn't indicate the tendency of individual hazard perception. In this study, we developed a method to measure individual hazard perception independent from specific knowledge and experience and to indicate the tendency of individual hazard perception. First of all, we defined hazard perception as “an ability to recognize the actual degree of risk of hazard correctly.” We showed test takers 10 situations in daily life that hazards may be hiding. Then, the test takers rearranged the 10 situations in order of “necessity to take immediate measures”. The scores of hazard perception are high when the test takers were able to answer in the correct order that the author defined. Moreover, the method can determine the test takers’ tendency of hazard perception from test takers’ answers.