Preparation and Psychometry of a Safety Assessment Questionnaire for Urban Gas Stations

Gas stations are the major component of the petroleum supply in a country. Few organizations are overlooking the safety status of gas stations using their specific guidelines and regulations. Numerous gas station accidents have demonstrated a huge potential for fire incidents in these centers due to their location in urban areas. Therefore, the aim of this study was a psychometric analysis of a newly developed questionnaire for assessment of urban gas stations based on the guidelines of regulatory organizations.
In this study, a safety questioner based on standards and regulatory guideline of governing organizations responsible for the operation and safety of gas stations in the country was considered. Then, terms and conditions related to safety were extracted based on four approaches to the safety strategies (inherent safety, passive safety, active safety and safety instructions) and a primary questionnaire was made. In the next step, face validity (12 experts) and content validity (10 experts) of the questionnaire, was reviewed to check its validity.
136 questions related to the safety matters was extracted from regulating bodies of the gas station, were extracted. For validation processes of the safety questionnaire in this study, the content, and performance of all questions by the panel of experts reviewed and organized in four groups of inherent safety (7 questions), active safety (2 questions), passive safety (47 questions ) and safety instructions (80 questions). According to the acceptable face and content validity indices (CVI = 0.79) and (CVR = 0.62) respectively, the number of questions in the questionnaire reduced to 66 questions. And the internal consistency of the questionnaire based on Cronbach's alpha statistic was 0.906 and reliability test based on ICC statistic is 0.906 with 95% Confidence limits and 906/0 agreement between the variant and F test = 10/671 and p-value = 0.001 to about 0/942 - 0/862, which it represents a strong agreement between variant.
Results showed that governing organizations on gas stations in some cases have parallel objectives. Also, very few provisions of the rules and safety guidelines of gas stations were related to more effective safety strategies (inherent safety and active safety), however, the most of provisions were focused on the use of inactive safety and instructions procedures. It is recommended that present regulations according to the findings of this study to be reviewed. The validated questionnaire of this study could be very helpful in the safety assessment of metropolitan gas stations and it can be used jointly by the governing organizations for the safety purposes.