Evaluating The Swedish Approach to Motivating Improved Work Safety Conditions on Farms: Insights from Fear Appeals and the Extended Parallel Processing Model

Abstract

Farm work safety intervention programs based on educating and informing have been criticized for not demonstrably improving work safety. We argue that these criticisms are misplaced and that the problem with educating and informing lies not necessarily in the tool, but rather in its implementation. We arrive at this conclusion by systematically investigating eight of the largest farm work safety interventions in Sweden. In particular, we describe how they use fear and other emotional appeals in their communications in an attempt to motivate improved work safety. We then analyze their implementation using the extended parallel processing model (EPPM). We show that, although threat of injury and death is used in the majority of these interventions to motivate individuals, the threat is inconsistent with the behaviors targeted. Other shortcomings and implications for implementing wide-scale farm work safety interventions are discussed.

Work safety interventions and threat complexity – A formative investigation into why farmers do not act safely

“…those perceived as either less serious and/or less likely to occur). Interestingly, several of these non-fear arousing threats were those communicated to farmers in work safety intervention programmes [12,14]. For example, the threat of fire (and subsequent need for a fire blanket and extinguisher) was seen as unlikely and not very serious, despite being one of the standard intervention behaviours promoted in, e.g.…”

“…Identifying efficacious responses to threats are more important than the threats that precede them [12]. The second research question posed by the authors sought to understand which actions farmers perceived to be effective, manageable, and cost effective in reducing threats to safety [19,20].…”

“…One explanation for this risk awareness -the risk prevention behaviour gap, may be a lack of farmers' motivation. However, most agricultural work safety interventions recognize (at least implicitly) the need to motivate farmers in order to influence safer work behaviours [12,13,14,15].…”

“…Fear is a powerful emotion that can be used to manipulate behaviours [16,17,18], and there is evidence indicating it is the most common motivational approach used in interventions to influence farm safety behaviour [12,14]. Therefore, awareness and motivation alone do not explain why many farmers continue to expose themselves to risks that lead to occupational injury, illness and death.…”

“…It is no surprise that farm work safety intervention programmes based on educating and informing have been criticized for not demonstrably improving work safety [7,30,31]. Alwall Svennefelt et al, [12] argue that these criticisms are misplaced and that the problem with educating and informing lies not primarily in the tool, but rather in its implementation.…”