Safety climate of UAE petroleum industry: a cross-validation using confirmatory factor analytic approach

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate a safety climate scale for measuring the safety climate in the oil and gas industry. Design/methodology/approach: The scale developed through conducting a literature review about the safety climate and constructing a question pool. The number of items was reduced to 51 after performing a screening process. Explanatory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were performed to examine the scale’s construct validity. Findings: CFA loadings were statistically significant. All Cronbach’s alpha (a) and composite reliability values support the construct reliability. The outcomes showed acceptable convergent and discriminant validity: AVEs showed acceptable values, and the square roots of AVE values showed higher values than the construct correlation values. Furthermore, all factor loadings exceeded 0.50, and the t-values were statistically significant. CFA loadings were statistically significant. Originality/value: The safety climate measuring scale of 43-instrument items produced in this study is reliable and valid for the oil and gas industry.