Precursory elements of safety culture: Exploratory analyses of engineering students’ safety attitudes

•Engineering students are future leaders of hazardous and technological industries.•Students’ attitudes towards/knowledge of engineering safety are understudied.•Students believe engineering safety is important, but knowledge is heterogeneous.•Some engineering majors’ students have negative attitudes towards safety.•Factor analysis identifies six latent constructs underpinning students’ attitudes. Introduction: Safety culture as a concept has been well-researched in the literature. There is less work, however, on how individuals entering the workforce acquire and partake in safety culture over time and how they might be primed to partake in the positive elements of safety culture. Method: We begin this exploration by surveying engineering students’ attitudes toward safety and experiences with safety education at the Georgia Institute of Technology (n = 316). Results: We find disparities among engineering disciplines, where some majors have more negative views toward safety than others. This may point to the need for more [effective] safety education to prevent negative attitudes toward safety in the workplace. In addition to describing trends among engineering students’ attitudes, this study also uses factor analysis to characterize the latent constructs of precursory safety culture: the safety-related attitudes that may direct how people engage with safety culture as early-career engineers. Practical Applications: The analysis provides a conceptual construction of precursor safety culture attitudes, which can serve as a guide to future measurement efforts.