Military safety surveys need redesign, Swedish research finds
Standard workplace safety questionnaires don't work reliably in military settings because hierarchy and obedience norms silence workers about hazards. Swedish Armed Forces researchers warn that adopting civilian safety tools without modification creates a false sense of workplace safety and masks real risks to personnel.
Originaltitel: Safety climate questionnaire development in military organisations: A bounded narrative synthesis and validity-evidence workflow
<p>Safety climate questionnaires such as the Nordic Safety Climate Questionnaire (NOSACQ-50) are widely used in high-risk work, but their transfer to military organisations cannot be assumed. In strongly hierarchical settings, authority gradients, obedience norms, and mission-oriented framings may alter item meaning and constrain candid reporting, particularly for items concerning autonomy, refusal of unsafe work, or speaking up to superiors.</p><p>This article presents a methodological paper based on a bounded narrative synthesis of a Swedish Armed Forces safety climate measurement programme. Drawing on six empirical programme outputs, the article examines which aspects of civilian safety climate measurement appear to transfer to military settings, which are vulnerable to meaning shifts under hierarchy, and what conditions are required for defensible use.</p><p>The synthesis indicates that NOSACQ-based measures can retain diagnostic value in military settings, but that direct transferability should not be assumed for all intended uses. Two recurrent threats are particularly important: construct under-representation when mission-relevant hazards and routines are insufficiently captured, and response-process distortion when hierarchy shapes what respondents perceive as legitimate or safe to report. On this basis, the article proposes a staged workflow for adapting, administering, and interpreting safety climate surveys in hierarchical organisations, while restricting between-unit benchmarking unless supported by measurement invariance or differential item functioning evidence.</p>