Unveiling Untapped Potential: Leveraging Accident Narratives for Enhanced Construction Safety Management

Every construction accident generates a comprehensive accident report, as mandated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). These reports are essential sources of data for understanding construction accidents. Accident narratives are particularly valuable because they provide descriptive insights into the circumstances, human actions, and environmental factors. However, despite their importance, narrative data has been underutilized. No research has yet established how and why such narratives hold critical insights into accidents beyond what is offered by other data. In response, this research aims to quantitively demonstrate insights exclusive to the construction accident narratives within construction accident reports by exploring OSHA construction accident reports, analyzing both descriptive and nondescriptive portions. We take a mixed-method approach that combines qualitative content analysis of narratives with quantitative comparative analysis, individually and collectively. Our four-step validation process involves: (1) systematic coding to interact with the OSHA accident record archive to scrap and extract construction accident data and (2) human-led multistage content analysis to identify risk attributes, (3) statistical analysis comparing results between narrative and tabular data, and (4) quantitative assessment of exclusive information in narratives. Our work is validated with 400 full OSHA accidents. From these, we derived 2,443 risk attributes from narratives (3.45 times more), while identifying only 708 risk attributes from quantitative data. Additionally, 91.6% of the narratives yield exclusive risk attributes, not found in tabular data sets. Our findings provide compelling evidence that accident narrative data yields significantly richer and more nuanced insights than traditional tabular data. This depth enables a more comprehensive understanding of the intricate factors behind construction accidents, including root causes and contextual contributors. Consequently, this study underscores the importance of incorporating narrative data in future construction safety research, advancing safety practices, policymaking, and prevention strategies.