Falls are a significant public health risk and a leading cause of non-fatal and fatal injuries among construction workers worldwide. A more comprehensive understanding of casual factors leading to fall incidents is essential to prevent falls in the construction industry. However, an extensive overview of causal factors is missing from the literature. In this paper, 536 articles on factors contributing to the risk of falls were retrieved. One hundred and twenty-one (121) studies met the criteria for relevance and quality to be coded, and were synthesized to provide an overview. In lieu of the homogeneity needed across studies to conduct a structured meta-analysis, a literature synthesis method based on macro-variables was advanced. This method provides a flexible approach to aggregating previous findings and assessing agreement across those studies. Factors commonly associated with falls included working surfaces and platforms, workers' safety behaviours and attitudes, and construction structure and facilities. Significant differences across qualitative and quantitative studies were found in terms of focus, and areas with limited agreement in previous research were identified. The findings contribute to research on the causes of falls in construction, developing engineering controls, informing policy and intervention design to reduce the risk of falls, and improving research synthesis methods.Accident causes, causal map, literature synthesis methods, safety,

Multiple types of users (i.e. patients and care providers) have experiences with the same technologies in health care environments and may have different processes for developing trust in those technologies. The objective of this study was to assess how patients and care providers make decisions about the trustworthiness of mutually used medical technology in an obstetric work system. Using a grounded theory methodology, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 25 patients who had recently given birth and 12 obstetric health care providers to examine the decision-making process for developing trust in technologies used in an obstetric work system. We expected the two user groups to have similar criteria for developing trust in the technologies, though we found patients and physicians differed in processes for developing trust. Trust in care providers, the technologies’ characteristics and how care providers used technology were all related to trust in medical technology for the patient participant group. Trustworthiness of the system and trust in self were related to trust in medical technology for the physician participant group. Our findings show that users with different perspectives of the system have different criteria for developing trust in medical technologies.

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The construction industry has experienced high numbers of occupational injuries and fatalities over the years. To address this issue, differences in safety attitudes and behaviours were explored among construction workers, first-line supervisors, and project managers in small residential construction companies with respect to recommendations for safety interventions. A triangulation design consisting of observation (shadowing), subjective quantitative (questionnaire), and subjective qualitative (interview) methods was used to obtain different but complementary data on the same safety challenges. Shadowing was utilized to explore onsite safety problems and/or risky behaviours resulting from safety attitudinal discrepancies among the three groups. Questionnaires were administered to identify salient themes for the observed practices. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to explore the causes of the observed safety problems. Results revealed that first-line supervisors did not enforce safety rules strictly or consistently, and that significant differences in safety attitudes and risk perceptions were observed among the three groups. Results also support a tendency among subcontractors to practise risky behaviours, even though they generally articulated a desire to avoid injuries. The recommended interventions include holding regular safety meetings between managers and workers, implementing informal training to supplement formal training, and closely examining and reviewing the appropriateness of health and safety policies.Safety, small business,