SMALL BUSINESS OWNERS HEALTH AND SAFETY BEHAVIOR

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DESCRIPTION: Small business owners are the major determinant for the level of health and safety found at a work site. Design of health and safety interventions requires an understanding of what motivates small business owners toward implementing occupational health and safety programs, policies, and practices in their workplaces. The goals of this project are (1) to review the literature for information on small business owners' knowledge, behavior, attitudes and beliefs about health and safety; (2) to develop a questionnaire which assesses these factors; and (3) to test this questionnaire with a group of small business owners. Experts from a number of fields (business, sociology, psychology, and occupational health) will be interviewed for information on small business owners' behaviors toward workplace health and safety. Behavioral models used in health promotion and education studies will be used as a guide for identifying individual, interpersonal, and societal factors which may influence owners' health and safety behaviors. A small number of successful and unsuccessful small business owners will be interviewed about their health and safety knowledge and behavior. Information from expert and owner interviews will be combined with that from behavioral theories and models in the development of a questionnaire. This questionnaire will be tested and refined with small groups of owners before it is mailed to a large group of owners. Multiple regression analysis will be used to assess the relationship between the reported level of health and safety and variables for health and safety knowledge, behavior, attitudes, and beliefs.