关 键 词：

农业机械 安全标志 外文 文献 英文

资源描述：

Safety signs on agricultural machinery Pictorials do not always successfully convey their messages to target users Federica Caffaro a Alberto Mirisolab Eugenio Cavalloa aInstitute for Agricultural and Earthmoving Machines IMAMOTER National Research Council of Italy CNR Strada delle Cacce 73 10135 Torino Italy bDepartment of Psychological Pedagogical and Educational Sciences University of Palermo Viale delle Scienze ed 15 90128 Palermo Italy a r t i c l ei n f o Article history Received 14 July 2015 Received in revised form 10 June 2016 Accepted 13 June 2016 Available online 28 June 2016 Keywords Agriculture Pictorial comprehension Safety a b s t r a c t This study investigated the extent to which a sample of Italian users comprehended safety pictorials used on agricultural machinery A questionnaire with 12 safety pictorials was administered to 248 users of agricultural machinery For each of the pictorials the participants were asked to select the most appropriate description of four written choices The investigated safety pictorials were in general not well comprehended Two different classes of participants were identifi ed each with a different level of comprehension The participants with better comprehension were characterized by the regular use of agricultural machinery and frequent previous exposure to pictorials The need for training courses focusing on safety pictorials and their meanings as well as the need for improvement to the pictorials themselves to make them more easily comprehended is discussed 2016 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved 1 Introduction The term pictorial in the present context refers to graphical forms that are increasingly used to convey information regarding safety issues in a broad range of circumstances They serve a variety of objectives with the overall aim of reducing accidents and in juries and the adoption and use of uniform and effective pictorials for safety communication is recommended in many international standards e g ANSI Z535 3 2011 In an attempt to change potentially dangerous behaviors pictorials provide information about hazards and their consequences in a way that it is assumed will increase the awareness of risks Furthermore they serve as reminders by raising awareness of information that may be latent Laughery 2006 Pictorials offer a number of advantages over written language Edworthy and Adams 1996 they can capture attention more quickly they can be more quickly comprehended and can be better remembered than words Young and Wogalter 1988 and they can quickly communicate concepts and in structions due to the large amount of information they can repre sent Wogalter et al 2006 Pictorials are particularly useful when the target audience has limited reading skills e g children the elderly illiterate individuals or are unfamiliar with the language that would be used in a written message Lesch 2003 Wogalter et al 1997 2002 Wogalter and Laughery 1996 Young and Wogalter 2000 Boelhouwer et al 2013 reported that pictorials may improve the communication for both na ve and expert users of safety information on safety data sheets and product labels Dowse and Ehlers 2005 showed that the incorporation of pictorials on medicinal labels contributes positively to the comprehension of and adherence to safety requirements Regarding pharmaceutical labels Kalsher et al 1996 report that labels with pictorials are preferred by both undergraduate students and older adults Many authors Davies et al 1998 Duarte and Rebelo 2005 Liu et al 2005 Rubbiani 2010 however have reported that the pic torials they have investigated have been poorly understood For example the Dowse and Ehlers 2001 study on the interpretation of pharmaceutical pictorials by a group of low literate participants indicated a low comprehension rate for most of the pictorials they studied Similarly poor comprehension is reported both in Rother s 2008 investigation on the interpretation of pesticide label picto rials among farmworkers and in a study by Chan and Ng 2010a on the comprehension of industrial safety pictorials Different char acteristics of the intended target audience and the audience s previous experience with the pictorials have been investigated in relation to pictorial comprehension for a review see Rogers et al 2000 However inconsistent results are reported in the literature on the role played by variables such as age and education Lesch 2003 Ng and Chan 2008 familiarity with the pictorials i e Corresponding author E mail address e cavallo r it E Cavallo Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Applied Ergonomics journal homepage http dx doi org 10 1016 j apergo 2016 06 003 0003 6870 2016 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved Applied Ergonomics 58 2017 156e166 prior experience with pictorials Hancock et al 2004 Ng and Chan 2011 and training received Brahm and Singer 2013 in enhancing the comprehension of safety pictorials Given their particular relevance in communicating safety in formation the use of pictorials has been investigated in many differentdomains suchaspharmaceuticals heavyindustry transport and consumer goods Barros et al 2014 Boelhouwer et al 2013 Davies et al 1998 Lesch 2003 Ng and Chan 2008 Rother 2008 Wogalter et al 1997 However few studies have investigated the use and effectiveness of pictorials as safety tools in the agricultural industry Agriculture together with mining and construction is one of the most hazardous sectors in both developing and industrialized countries International Labor Organization ILO 2014 Approxi mately 170 000 out of some 335 000 fatal workplace accidents worldwide occur among agricultural workers ILO 2014 and the rate of fatal accidents in agriculture in several European countries and in the United States is double the average for all other in dustries Molari et al 2014 Mongin et al 2007 Rautiainen et al 2010 Farmers and farm workers are particularly at risk because they generally handle potentially dangerous machinery vehicles and chemicals all of which dramatically increase the risks of fatal and non fatal injuries The few studies investigating safety pictorials in the agricultural industries have examined messages regarding chemicals Some studies that assessed the understanding of pictorials used in pesticide exposure risk communication reported low comprehen sion rates for a review see Emery et al 2015 With regard to the factors affecting the comprehension levels of safety pictorials adopted for chemicals contrasting results are reported in the literature Indeed considering the sociodemographic variables gender appeared to enhance comprehensibility Rother 2008 whereas age and education did not report any signifi cant effects Rubbiani 2010 With regard to the expertise of the participants and familiarity with the pictorials these variables showed a sig nifi cant positive effect on compliance in the study by Ortiz et al 2000 whereas more complex and ambiguous results are re ported in other studies Boelhouwer et al 2013 Edworthy et al 2004 Finally contrasting results are reported on training the work by Rubbiani 2010 showed that the effective understanding of pictorials was facilitated by training whereas Rother 2008 found that those who reported having been trained were less likely to have suffi cient knowledge of the pictorials used on pesti cide labels 1 1 Pictorials on agricultural machinery Many authors list farm machinery as a major source of injury in agriculture Douphrate et al 2009 Forastieri 2001 Jawa et al 2013 Narasimhan et al 2010 In particular the highest number of fatalities involves tractors 9 6 tractor related injuries 1000 persons per year are reported by Carlson et al 2005 in the United States Cavallo et al 2014a reported that tractor roll over is the leading cause of fatal injuries among farmers and farm workers A similar picture emerges in European Union countries European Commission 2009 and within the European Union Italy is a particularly heavily affected country accounting for nearly 24 of the 150 000 accidents reported in the agricultural fi shing and forestry sectors in 2012 Eurostat 2015 In 2010 more than 1 6 million holdings 13 2 of the EU 28 s holdings in Italy with an average dimension 7 9 ha below that of the EU 28 14 2 ha exist and in 2008 approximately 1 75 million tractors were in use Cavallo et al 2014b In Italy tractor accidents are the leading cause of injuries in agriculture in 2013 121 fatal accidents involving tractors occurred with tractor roll over being the main cause of fatalities 70 followed by crushing or being run over by tractors 10 FederUnacoma 2014 In a move towards reducing this level a number of authors Caputo et al 2013 Murphy and Anderson 1992 Purschwitz 2006 have proposed that a safety hierarchy protocol be applied in the design of machineryand equipmenttoensure safe use byend users This protocol consists of a three step procedure 1 the elimination of the sources of hazards by design 2 the adoption of technical protective solutions when hazards cannot be eliminated and 3 the provision of information to end users through the use of warnings Warnings which include safety indicators such as pic torials and written messages make end users aware of the residual risks d i e risks that could not be removed by design or safeguards d and inform the end users about the appropriate method of using equipment or machinery to avoid these residual hazards Fraser 2009 ISO 14121 1 2007 Thus warnings are not a substitute for good design or adequate safeguards they should be used as a supplementtoothersafety relatedapproaches Lehtoand Salvendy 1995 This 3 step process is included in the Principles of safety integration adopted in the European Machine Directive European Commission 2006 which is in force throughout the European Union countries Fraser 2009 The adoption of this 3 step approach to risk reduction is also recommended by the ISO 11684 1995 standard which establishes the principles for the design and application of safety signs for agricultural and forestry machinery After reporting the different steps through which the risks should be eliminated or reduced the standard states Even when the appropriate design features and safety devices are incorporated into machinery some residual risks may remain Safety signs warn operators or other exposed persons about such residual risks par 3 2 p 1 The standard provides four different formats for safety signs based on different combinations of signal panels containing the safetyalert symbol and one of these words Caution Warning or Danger message panels containing a text and pictorial panels containing graphical forms The stan dard considers two types of pictorials those that present a visual description of the hazard and the consequences of not avoiding the hazard and those that issue visual instructions on how the hazard should be avoided Caffaro and Cavallo 2015 investigated the knowledge of safety pictorials used in agricultural machinery and their noticeability The pictorials examined were poorly comprehended and were re ported as being seen on the machine itself rather than in operator s manuals In addition familiarity with the pictorials without having received training signifi cantly increased users comprehension The issue of pictorial relevance and noticeability has also been inves tigated in other studies that focused on safety warnings on tractor operator s manuals These studies noted that the manuals have poor document design which does not clarify critical information and discourages readers Tebeaux 2010a Over time manufac turers made efforts to warn operators about the risks associated with tractors Tebeaux 2010b but the information given in the manuals is required to comply with laws and safety regulations rather than to inform operators Tebeaux 2010a 1 2 Aims of the study The present study is based on some considerations arising from a review of the literature Pictorials are relevant safety tools especially in agriculture which is a highly hazardous sector ILO 2014 however few F Caffaro et al Applied Ergonomics 58 2017 156e166157 studies have investigated pictorial comprehensibility in this sector In agriculture the main cause of accidents is machinery Forastieri 2001 and the use of pictorials on machinery to warn users against risks is highly recommended Fraser 2009 ISO 11684 1995 or even mandatory European Commission 2006 However there is a lack of studies on the comprehensibility of safety pictorials affi xed to agricultural machinery whereas the main evidence comes from studies on pesticides labels Emery et al 2015 The few studies addressing pictorial comprehension in the agricultural sector Caffaro and Cavallo 2015 Emery et al 2015 reported low comprehension rates and inconsistent results about the effects of user variables familiarity with the pictorials and training on comprehension performance However the previous studies on this topic were focused on pictorial comprehension performance as a whole without giving specifi c attention to the characteristics of the samples involved in the study We supposed that the incon sistency of the results reported in the literature may depend on the presence in the population of users and consequently in the samples surveyed by the authors of different patterns of pictorial comprehension which depend in turn on a number of user vari ables and users experience with the machinery Bearing these considerations in mind the present study aimed at building a typology of users based on different patterns of comprehension of safety pictorials affi xed to agricultural machin ery in a sample of Italian users Italy is a relevant context to study this issue because of the high number of machinery related fatal ities FederUnacoma 2014 2 Method 2 1 Participant recruitment Participants in the survey were recruited during the 33rd Na tional Exhibition of Agricultural Mechanization an important annual machinery show held in Savigliano which is located in the Piemonte region of northwestern Italy The event is the largest agricultural machinery exhibition in the area the 2014 show was attended by 60 000 visitors The Piemonte region one of twenty Italian regions includes approximately 10 of the total Italian Utilized Agricultural Area UAA Istituto Nazionale di Economia Agraria INEA 2014 and includes 35 of the Po River catch ment here agriculture takes place on the plains 41 of UAA mainly with maize based systems and in the hills 31 of UAA mainly with wine grapes and winter cereals Bassanino et al 2011 Livestock farms account for 25 of all farms and intensive breeding systems are not uncommon Bassanino et al 2011 Over 61 000 of a total of 1 620 884 Italian agricultural holdings operate in this re gion INEA 2014 Thus the local farming system and rural popu lation are a suitable representation of the Italian farming system Because those involved in agriculture are disseminated across the country and have varying operating schedules agricultural machineryexhibitions are one of the few occasions at which a large and wide ranging group of agricultural workers converge Such events therefore provide a suitable place for surveys and other data collection tasks Cavallo et al 2014b 2014c Ferrari et al 2012 G or c et al 2014 Kuijt Evers et al 2003 Reichardt and J rgens 2009 Tillapaugh et al 2010 For the present study almost 400 paper and pencil question naires were distributed to owners and or users of agricultural machinery who were randomly selected among the people visiting the exhibition The response rate was approximately 80 resulting in 304 completed surveys 2 2 Instrument The questionnaire included 12 safety pictorials from the ISO 11684 1995 standard The pictorials selected for the study are shown in Fig 1 The pictorials presented visual instructions on how to avoid hazards hazard avoidance pictorials as defi ned in ISO 11684 1995 which were related to the most serious accidents in agriculture Douphrate et al 2009 Jawa et al 2013 The pictorials were presented on the questionnaire in a two panel vertical format the safety alert symbol above and the hazard avoidance pictorial below This format corresponds to one of the four alter natives provided by ISO 11684 1995 and was adopted because it is the only one of four formats that does not include any text The pictorials were presented in the same layout as those found in operator s manuals and on machinery black drawings on a yellow background Each participant was asked to select the most appro priate verbal description from among four choices to describe the meaningof each of the 12 pictorials The fouralternatives presented see Chan and Ng 2010a 2010b included a correct answer a partially correct answer and two incorrect answers The correct answers were from the ISO 11684 1995 standard whereas the partially correct and incorrect responses were designed on the basis of free form answers given by a group of 10 agricultural workers in an open ended pre test phase as observed in Lesch 2003 and Chan and Ng 2010b Two independent safety pro fessionals categorized the responses given in the pre test as partially correct or incorrect with an average agreement of 84 The partially correct answers refer to a general identifi cation of the hazard represented by the pictorial leading tothe correct avoidance behavior while the incorrect answers correspond to the lack of identifi cation of the specifi c hazard even if the operator adopts the avoidance behavior As an example the four verbal labels for Pictorial 4 in Fig 1 were Attention e Do not put feet under rotating knives correct Attention e Do not move close to moving units partially correct Attention e Do not rotate drive units by foot incorrect and Attention e Do not get feet closer e Falling weight incorrect It is known in the literature that the method adopted when assessing pictorial comprehension can infl uence the results of the test and the open ended format is usually recommended so as not to infl ate the comprehension scores Wolff and Wogalter 1998 Nevertheless in the present study the multiple choice response format rather than the open ended format was adopted for a number of reasons all of which are associated with the aim of achieving in the specifi c circumstances a high return rate with truthful and reliable data Open ended questions are more complex than closed ended ones Schuman and Presser 1981 and being more complex can interact with the complex setting and the cognitive abilities and motivations of the interviewees leading to more biased data Schuman and Presser 1981 Furthermore ac cording to Fowler 1992 the more complex the questions are the more serious the self selection bias is with more people unavai lable unable or unwilling to answer the questions For each of the pictorials the questionnaire also included also a question regarding previous exposure with three alternative an swers never seen sometimes seen and often seen For the pictorials that are alreadyseen an additional questionwas included in the questionnaire to ascertain where the pictorial has been noticed before with three possible alternative responses on the machine in the manual and other Data regarding where the par ticipants reported having previously seen the pictorial are pre sented and discussed in another forum Caffaro and Cavallo 2015 F Caffaro et al Applied Ergonomics 58 2017 156e166158 Finally the questionnaire included a section requesting relevant socio demographic and machine usage information gender age area of origin education occupation agricultural machines used and the frequency of such use and participation in the past 12 months in training courses in which the relevance meaning and use of pictorials were discussed 2 3 Procedure The participants were recruited from among the visitors to the exhibition The questionnaire was distributed by trained research assistants to visitors passing through the exhibition The potential participants were informed of the aims of t

内容简介：

-