Assessing the participatory dimension of a hands-on training intervention on Industrial and Environmental Safety in a Chemicals Plant in Portugal

Participation is increasingly portrayed as a key aspect to intervene in Health and Safety at Work. Still, participation is an ambiguous and controversial concept due to the multiple representations that one can have about it. This paper aims to analyse the perceived participation of employees who have been involved in a participatory action-training intervention (the Matriosca Project), particularly through their response to a questionnaire drawn up for this purpose. An exploratory factor analysis allowed the extraction of three factors: "perceived impact", "perception of involvement" and "conflicts associated with participation". Through a Student's t-test it was concluded that the means of the participants' responses to items belonging to the factors "perceived impact" and "perception of involvement" were significantly above the scale midpoint. As for the mean of the participants' responses to the items belonging to the factor " conflicts associated with participation", it was significantly below the scale midpoint. Taking into account what each factor represents in terms of perceived participation, it is possible to infer that the subjects evaluate their participation in Matriosca Project in a positive way. The potential for using this instrument in future interventions and the importance of its contextualization among other elements of assessment (such as those that result from the analysis of work activities in question) are also discussed.