H&S PERCEPTION

Evaluation of Health and Safety Issues at Workplace

[Name of the Institute]Questionnaire VS Focus Groups

Study on human behaviour, perception, or opinions require analysing what people say. The response of participants in a study can be collected primarily through many ways in which surveys are the most common method using various instruments like questionnaire and in-depth interviews or focus group.

Questionnaire, once designed, can use to collect data from a large size population in a cost effective and time efficient manner. If the questionnaire is self administered, the researcher's influence on responses is eliminated. The only influence that a researcher can put on to the responses is the options provided in the questionnaire, and this is the limitation to this instrument that the large variety of opinions cannot be covered through limited options given in a questionnaire. Chances of false information are also high in using this instrument. The most important benefit of using this approach in data collection is a large sample size that helps in generalization of the findings.

In contrast, focus group has no limit of opinions and responses. Participants provide a large variety of responses and hence a truer picture of the actual behaviours and perceptions is obtained. For the objective of thorough investigation the instrument of focus group is useful. The reliability of the data obtained from focus group is uncertain. Where chances of fake information are reduced on the same time the chances of researcher's or interviewer's influence on the responses are high also the participants might hesitate in revealing their point of view in front of others. Also the sample is comparatively small in focus group that results in the lack of generalisation of the findings.

Two approaches are often taken in evaluation of perceptions or opinions. First is to include open ended questions in the questionnaire and second is to use both instruments in the study. Following are some examples of the studies that used either questionnaire or focus group to evaluate the health and safety awareness.

Annette M. Jinks, Ruth Daniels, (1999) obtained the health and safety concerns of employees at Acute Hospital through analysing the perceptions of the employees. The instrument used was a focus group of 27 workers. Marine Parker Brown and Nga Nguyen-Scott (1992) used focus group instrument as a complimentary method, the other tool they used is risk chart. The task of this study is to find that whether the worker training programs encourage trainees to use acquired knowledge for correction of problems related health and safety at workplace. In contrast questionnaire is less likely to be used as a complimentary instrument and many studies used questionnaire as sole instrument. One such study is done by Paschal Sheeran and Michael Silverman (n.d.) which evaluates the effectiveness of the procedures implemented to promote the attendance of health and safety training courses at work place. 271 respondents participated in this study.

Question A:

Values of the earning are scale and continuous while the value to gender is a string. To evaluate the relationship we first transform ...