The influence of safety at work on safety at home and during leisure time

It has been argued that the effects of safety programmes extend to safety related behaviour outside the work environment. Data from studies of the behaviour of workers in three industries with a high focus on safety were examined in order to explore this argument. By means of data collected through a questionnaire, safe behaviour and emergency preparedness behaviour at home and during leisure time were measured in a case-control study. The findings indicate that workers in two of the three studies did not transfer safe behaviour from workplaces with a high focus on safety to home and leisure arenas. The safety consciousness acquired by workers at their workplaces in the absence of specially designed home and leisure time intervention projects seems to be insufficiently comprehensive or deep enough to influence safe behaviour in other arenas. While safe behaviour was not transferred, the emergency preparedness behaviour was. This indicates that the contextual and situational aspects of emergency preparedness are shared across risk arenas.