Railway safety awareness campaigns as an educative process

Abstract

In the railway industry (like other industries), safety awareness campaigns are conducted as intervention programmes for providing educational programmes to change the attitudes and behaviours of the general public that interact with the railway environment. Such educational intervention programmes are ideally achieved by following pedagogical principles that ensure programme quality. However, it seems that even with the use of safety awareness campaigns, the desired safety behaviour among the general public in the railway environment is not yet established. The purpose of this research study was to understand how the Railway Safety Regulator (RSR) – as the custodian of railway safety in South Africa – plans, designs and implements its safety awareness campaigns as an educative process to combat railway-related occurrences involving the general public. As an exploratory study, the researcher applied the industry standard logic model framework (LMF) to guide the process of the investigation and utilised an interpretivist lens to understand the context of the phenomenon investigated. Following a qualitative programme evaluation research approach, a safety awareness campaign was studied as a single case study to understand how the RSR plans and develops their safety awareness campaigns. Six purposively selected RSR employees participated in the study, providing qualitative data through semi-structured interviews and document analysis. The findings of the study conclude that the Regulator’s current practice of conducting awareness campaigns does not reflect an educative process, hence helping to explain why the envisaged change in public behaviour is not attained.