Research on the Development of a Socioecological Model for Underground Miners' Unsafe Behaviour in Coal Mine

ABSTRACT The safety situation in China's coal industry remains gloomy, and it is critical to strengthen behavioural safety management for underground miners. To compensate for the current academia's lack of basic research on the mechanism of underground miners' unsafe behaviour, bibliometric analysis and grounded theory are used to retrieve and screen, with 190 closely related literature from the CNKI (China National Knowledge Infrastructure) and WOS (Web of Science) repositories to establish a literature database. By conducting analysis of keyword co‐occurrence and theme evolution, social, organizational, environmental and individual factors that influence unsafe behaviour are identified. With an open coding, a set of 193 types of influencing factors is established. Then, principal axis coding and selective coding are used to build a system consisting of 29 basic categories, 2 dimensions of internal and external factors and 4 levels of individual, group, organization and society. After more dialectical analysis and theoretical investigation, a closed‐loop mechanism model is developed, covering two main parts: IBM (Internal Behavioral Mechanism) and EBIM (External Behavioral Influence Mechanism). ‘Perception‐cognition‐behaviour’ is the core chain of this model, which explains how unsafe behaviours occur. Ultimately, an overall structure of ‘individual–microenvironment–macroenvironment’ is used to create a socioecological model of underground miners' unsafe behaviour through the integration of the system of influencing factors, with 246 coal mine safety accident investigation reports used to confirm the applicability and interpretability of the model. Because the study's theories and data are derive from published literature, its conclusions are highly credible, scientific, thorough and systematic. Additionally, they can offer theoretical direction for future research in the fields of risk assessment, early warning and precontrol of underground miners' unsafe behaviour.