Search results

THIS paper presents an approximate method of stressing circular plates of non‐uniform thickness subjected to symmetrical lateral loading. Although exact solutions are available for plates of uniform thickness under various types of loading, solutions for plates of non‐uniform thickness have been obtained for only a few special instances. Generally, the problem does not admit of an exact solution, but the approximate method described here, which is similar to the well‐known ‘sum and difference’ method for rotating disks, is capable of a high degree of accuracy.

THE bending moments in a strut with lateral loading can usually be found graphically by means of the Polar (Howard) Diagram, but with a strut of non‐uniform section and a complex load system it is difficult to obtain an accurate solution without drawing to an inconveniently large scale. The tabular method described here is applicable to struts of varying section with any load system and involves only arithmetical calculation. The strut is divided into a convenient number of ‘simple’ segments, i.e. segments of uniform section with no point loads applied within the length of each segment, and successive applications are made of relations between the bending moment and slope at either end of the segments. Two trial solutions are necessary, from which the required solution is readily obtained.

THE purpose of this paper is to present a method of determining the bending moments in a circular ring which is both speedy and accurate, and is particularly useful when dealing with a complex loading system. A general method which can also be modified for application to rings of any shape and of varying section is first dealt with. The particular case of a circular ring of constant section is then considered, the method being such that the work may be done entirely by substitution in formula or by obtaining values from curves which are readily plotted.

Under-reporting of an occupational accident is commonly found at both organisational and individual levels. It interferes with the reality of health and safety in organisations and countries. It also hinders the ability to identify trends, recognise priorities, improve strategies, and allocation of resources for accident prevention. This study examined the reasons for the under-reporting of occupational accidents at the organisation level in the Nigerian construction industry. A review of the literature was conducted on the under-reporting of occupational accidents. Thereafter, a field survey with questionnaires was distributed to solicit information from the Nigerian construction professionals in the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, Nigeria. 300 questionnaires were distributed, and 235 responses were received and analysed with Microsoft Excel and SPSS software by applied relative importance index and ranked. The study found that among the top-ranked reasons for under-reporting of occupational accidents by the organisation is to maintain a reputation. It is therefore important to increase awareness on the reporting of occupational accidents and its importance in accident prevention programmes by the regulatory bodies. Also, more collaborative efforts, standards, and policies should be put in place by the governments for ensuring reporting and record-keeping of accidents in the Nigerian construction industry. Records of dangerous incidents are the key indicator for the organisation for the improvement in the prevention of hazards. The study, therefore, concludes that there should be proper recording and surveillance of occupational accidents, hazards, and their related background causes in reaction to quick and complex variations in work-life.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the significant antecedents that influence students’ awareness of occupational hazards (AOHs) in their respective institutions. The researchers proposed a theoretical model consisting of three dimensions: knowledge sharing behavior (KSB), sense of spirituality (SS) and awareness of occupational hazards (AOHs).

This study targets students of different public and private higher learning institutions in Bangladesh with a total of 260 respondents, utilizing a survey questionnaire as the data collection instrument to test the proposed conceptual model. The structural equation modeling approach was used to test the proposed model.

The results show that SS has a mediating effect on KSB and AOHs at higher learning institutions.

The study contributes for first time to the theoretical novelty of the body of the existing literature in the domains of students’ KSB, SS and AOHs. The study also provides insight on future research directions by helping in identifying gaps in literature in this field and higher learning institutions in Bangladesh.

Current research on mental health in the construction industry is fragmented, making it difficult to obtain a complete picture of young construction workers’ mental health conditions. This situation adversely affects research progress, mental health-care planning and resource allocation. To address this challenge, the purpose of this paper was to identify the themes of mental health conditions among young construction workers and their prevalence by geographical location.

The scoping review was conducted using meta-aggregation, guided by the CoCoPop (condition [mental health], context [construction industry] and population [construction workers 35 years old and younger]) and PRISMA-ScR (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for scoping reviews) frameworks.

A total of 327 studies were retrieved, and 14 studies published between 1993 and 2022 met the inclusion criteria. The authors identified 13 mental health conditions and categorized them under nine themes. Mood disorders, anxiety disorders and substance-related disorders constituted the most researched themes. Studies predominantly focused on young male workers in the Global North. The prevalence estimates reported in most of the studies were above the respective country’s prevalence.

This review extends previous studies by focusing specifically on the themes of mental health conditions and giving attention to young construction workers whose health needs remain a global priority. The study emphasizes the need to give research attention to lesser-studied aspects of mental health, such as positive mental health. The need to focus on female construction workers and on homogenous sub-groups of young workers is also emphasized. The findings can guide future systematic reviews on the identified thematic areas and help to plan the development of interventions.

Despite the efforts of organizations to improve safety performance, shortfalls of the strategies have been reported in numerous studies around the globe. However, previous studies in countries with more organized construction sectors show that adopting a resilient safety culture by organizations has a tendency of improving safety performance. As safety culture is dynamic which differs with geographical context, the purpose of this paper is to achieve two objectives: testing the causal relationship between safety performance and resilience safety culture in the Nigerian construction environment; and determining the key components for ensuring the resilience of construction organizations with regards to safety.

Quantitative research approach was used. Data was collected using a structured questionnaire. The population of the study comprises small and medium construction organizations predominantly across the Northern region in the Nigerian built environment. A total of 180 questionnaires were distributed to construction managers and safety managers in respective organizations to serve as respondents to the study. Partial least square – structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to test the relationship between safety performance and resilience safety culture. While principal component analysis was used determining the key components for ensuring the resilience of construction organizations with regards to safety.

Findings of this study revealed that resilient safety culture has a significantly strong positive relationship with safety performance. Safety hazard recognition and effective safety response attitude were identified as the key components for guaranteeing a resilient safety culture.

With a view to achieve a consistently high safety performance, organizations have to acknowledge and anticipate unexpected hazardous events and provide the necessary safety resources to manage them. Furthermore, there is also the need to create awareness on recognized safety concerns on safety hazards, coupled with a dynamic risk response attitude to ensure consistent improvement in safety performance.

This study presents an alternative to the slow and reactive safety culture of the Nigerian built environment. This study builds on existing literature, and the findings explore the potential impact of adopting a resilient safety culture in construction organizations in Nigeria. This study provided further insights into key factors organizations need to focus on to ensure resilient nature. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no prior study in this regard was conducted in Nigeria despite its apparent need.

The research was carried out to statistically evaluate the relationship between the safety measures at the construction sites and the actual and perceived knowledge levels of the employees about these measures.

Face-to-face surveys were conducted with the workers. The survey included some perception-based questions about preventive measures at the construction site, as well as determining the level of awareness of employees on occupational health and safety (OHS) practices. The data were analyzed with descriptive statistical methods and bivariate correlation analysis.

The actual knowledge levels of workers on OHS measures in the workplace is significantly lower than their perceived knowledge levels. However, there is a positive, linear and strong relationship between the actual knowledge levels of the employees about some OHS rules applied in the workplace and the general level of knowledge they perceive about themselves. Some protective measures such as occupational safety expert, OHS board, employee representatives, training and information activities at construction sites positively affect the safety awareness of employees. However, low-frequency and documentation-intensive activities such as risk assessment, emergency activities and periodic controls have no or weak correlations.

Perception-based opinions of construction site workers on occupational safety issues are transformed into numerical data and analyzed with a quantitative method.

Building construction is considered a complex, dynamic and highly hazardous process, which embraces many factors that are potentially dangerous to workers. Many studies proved that the improvement of preventive and proactive measures – dynamically included in the building design, planning and construction – could reduce site accidents as well as increase the site productivity. In this context, process management models and information visualization techniques such as building information modeling (BIM) and virtual reality (VR) seem to be devoted to strongly contribute to the advancement of the current safety management practices. For these reasons, the presented contribution is based on the assumption that a more nuanced approach for construction worker's safety training is warranted and the authors propose a safety training protocol based on BIM-enabled VR activity simulations.

The methodology comprised a safety training protocol based on BIM-enabled VR activity simulations. The protocol addresses three methodological issues: (1) Planning in terms of training typologies and related health and safety contents to be implemented in the VR construction site scenarios; (2) Management regarding the solution to integrate BIM and game technologies to deliver VR training experiences; (3) Administration in terms of definition of standardized rules to define a safety training schedule in a given construction project.

This work contributes to provide a standardized protocol for a viable integration of BIM and VR technologies for construction safety training in real projects.

The VR training protocol was applied to a construction project based in Italy that served as case study for the development of the training sessions' contents and their implementation. This case demonstrated the feasibility of the protocol's implementation and pointed out the drawbacks and limitations on which further efforts need to be spent in order to take the proposed protocol from a prototypical stage to a maturity for its larger-scale adoption from the practitioners involved in construction safety training.

The research gives a contribution to reduce the currently existing knowledge gap regarding how BIM and VR can be simultaneously integrated in real projects for construction safety training by using standardized rules to be extensively reproduced in different construction projects. It uses a customized toolkit with a mobile smartphone solution to administer Safety Training Scenarios which increases its portability in construction site compared to PC-based VR solutions.

This meta-analysis aims to verify the efficacy of occupational health and safety (OHS) training in terms of knowledge, attitude and beliefs, behavior and health.

The authors included studies published in English (2007–2014) selected from ten databases. Eligibility criteria were studies concerned with the effectiveness of OHS training for primary prevention of workplace injury; and studies focused on examined outcome related to OHS.

The selected studies (n = 28) highlighted a strong support for the effectiveness of training on worker OHS attitudes and beliefs and, to a lesser extent, on worker’s knowledge but only medium for behavior and small evidences for its effectiveness on health.

Future research should more deeply investigate the efficacy on knowledge increase of trainings delivered by experts and researchers, applying different methods, in a small group; training delivered by peer and by researcher, applying different methods; and trained workers less than 29 years and more than 49 years old, considering that workers in these age groups are particularly vulnerable to fatalities.

Our study is a contribution for those they intend to grant effective training, in response to specific needs of OHS. The evidences presented could be considered a first step to identify the factors related to the efficacy of OHS training to plan adequate interventions.

The OHS training is effective on the basis of the extent interventions are carried out for each specific learning outcome.

This meta-analysis suggested that classroom training, although the most used and studied, does not ever revealed itself very effective: it was not significant for outcomes in terms of knowledge and showed a decreasing efficacy for attitudes and beliefs, behaviors and health. It seemed that there was a distinction between interventions on knowledge, attitudes and beliefs, as opposed to behavioral interventions and health.