Monitoring and improving safety and health in construction activities for concrete structures

The construction industry is inherently high levels of risk, particularly in tasks such as formwork for concrete structures. To enhance safety and understand workers' adaptive behaviors, this study employed the critical decision method (CDM), a semistructured interview technique that uses cognitive probes to identify disturbances that workers have to deal with in their work activity. This study focused on describing variability in formwork work on concrete structures, and understanding the resilience of workers to unexpected events. For this purpose, a series of semistructured interviews were conducted with construction employees with extensive experience in formwork work in Spain by applying the CDM adapted to the safety II framework aligned with the resilience engineering (RE) paradigm. Findings revealed that workers more frequently identified unthought-of situations - scenarios not previously anticipated by the formworkers beforehand - compared with potential unexpected situations, which are unforeseen but conceivable events as possible before the intervention. The study underscores the importance of leveraging workers' first-hand experiences to enhance decision-making and resilience, thereby improving risk assessment processes and facilitating proactive accident prevention in the construction industry. Furthermore, a key theoretical contribution of this study is the adaptation of the CDM in conjunction with RE to the construction industry.