Workplace Safety Behavioral Tendencies in Highway Maintenance: Development of a Content-Valid Item Pool Based on a Dual-Process Framework

Abstract

Highway maintenance work exposes employees to persistent safety demands involving live traffic, temporary traffic control, heavy equipment, variable weather, fatigue, and production pressure. The present study reports Phase 1 of a systematic post-exploratory refinement program for a context-specific item pool assessing safety-related behavioral tendencies. A provisional 36-item pool representing seven hypothesized dimensions was evaluated by 10 subject matter experts (SMEs) for relevance and clarity and then examined through cognitive interviews with 6 highway maintenance workers. Item-level content validity indices (I-CVI) ranged from .80 to 1.00 (S-CVI/Ave = .98), and mean item clarity was 3.29 on a 4-point scale. The SME decision audit classified 22 items for retention, 11 for revision, and 3 for removal; subsequent cognitive-interview and readability review produced additional wording refinements, yielding a 33-item revised pool. The near-ceiling relevance profile is interpreted cautiously because 5 of 10 SMEs were drawn from highway maintenance organizations and many panelists shared overlapping safety credentials. Cognitive interviews identified wording clarity and socially desirable phrasing as the most common interpretive problems. The resulting pool remains developmental and is prepared for subsequent psychometric testing; no new claims of reliability, factor structure, predictive validity, or operational use are made for the revised 33-item version.