The Effects of Individual Behavioral Counseling on the Attitudes to Work Safety of Thai Power Plant Workers

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to study the effect of individual behavioral counseling on power plant workers’ attitudes to occupational safety behavior. The sample used in this study consisted of 32 power plant workers, who were randomly divided into two groups. One group was the experimental group, which received an individual behavioral counseling program in 10 weekly sessions and the other was the control group, which received no treatment. The instruments used in this study was the Occupational Safety Behavior of Power Plant Worker Inventory and the Individual Behavioral Counseling Program was designed by the researcher. The data collecting procedure was carried out in three phases: the ‘Pre-test’, the ‘Post-test’ and the ‘Follow-up’. Data were analyzed by repeated measures analysis of variance: one between-subjects variable and one within-subjects variable, and a paired-difference test using the Newman-Keuls procedure. The results of the study indicated that there was a statistically significant interaction at the .05 level between the treatment method and the phase of experiment. The power plant workers in the experimental group had higher mean scores in occupational safety behavior than those in the control group in the Posttest and Follow-up phases, while there was no statistically significant difference between the two groups at the Pretest. It was concluded that the counseling program had made a difference to the work safety attitudes of the workers who had received this intervention.

Keywords : Occupational Safety Behavior, Individual Counseling, Behavior Counseling, Power Plant Workers