Graduate Student Safety Culture

Abstract

A culture is a collective of social norms, mannerisms, religion, language, activities, environment, and other factors that help to make us who we are. Within any culture lies its safety culture. How does an organization assess its safety culture? One method is to interview every person in an organization. However, this is impractical. Properly constructed safety surveys provide information that can be used to assess and to help improve an organization’s safety culture. Laboratory experiments of varying levels of hazards are conducted every day around the world in colleges and universities. These experiments are for basic and applied research and for teaching undergraduate and graduate students how to conduct research. Generally, these experiments are conducted safely. Many accidents have occurred in University Laboratories. Some are very horrific. This paper discusses one such accident and discusses two universities’ safety culture surveys and presents some results from the surveys.

Keywords: Safety Culture, Graduate Student Safety, Potentially Hazardous Laboratories

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1001102