Abstract Description: Many methods and practices that keep workers healthy and safe are well established. However, their inadequate implementation is a problem that causes many occupational injuries and illnesses, hindering performance, morale, and worker health outcomes. A major barrier to adequate implementation of occupational health and safety frameworks is human factors and occupational health and safety motivation, more specifically, the combination of internal and external motivation to engage in safe behaviors in the workplace. Focusing on the aviation industry, up to 2/3 of all accidents can be attributed to human factors. During on-the-job training, workers are taught the best safety practices. They are concurrently exposed to the safety culture of a workplace, an important predictor of safety outcomes. Yet, our understanding of the impact of training on perceptions of workplace safety is limited. The aviation workers who are most likely to be exposed to unsafe working conditions often come from lower economic backgrounds. The presence of accidents and hazardous exposures to chemical, biological and physical agents in the aviation industry then emerges as a social justice issue where workers with lower incomes are disproportionately negatively impacted by unsafe working conditions. A knowledge gap remains concerning the connection between training time and attitudes surrounding safety culture. Addressing this knowledge gap is a crucial next step in aviation occupational safety. It is hypothesized that as time since the worker’s training increases, workers’ occupational health and safety motivations decrease. This mixed-methods longitudinal study addresses this gap through a questionnaire and semi-structured interview. Participants were members of the United States Air Force (USAF) who received job training at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (WPAFB). Measures of safety culture and participant attitudes toward safety were collected within 24 hours of training, then one month and three months later. Participants completed the Safety Culture: Evaluation Survey from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) to measure safety culture. A split-half reliability test was conducted to test subject reliability in responses. A repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to assess differences in safety attitudes based on time since training and job title. Participant attitudes were assessed through semi-structured interviews, which assessed personal attitudes and feelings surrounding safety and perceived consequences of unsafe behaviors in the workplace. The interviews were transcribed and coded. Themes were established and deductive coding was used to assess applicability to the hypothesis. Data triangulation was used to relate quantitative and qualitative results.
