Conversations about safety: protecting young farm workers
Abstract
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Conversations about safety: protecting young farm workers
- Creators
- Anna Rose Proctor
- Contributors
- Diane Rohlman (Advisor)Elizabeth O'Neal (Committee Member)Carri Casteel (Committee Member)Ebonee Johnson (Committee Member)
- Resource Type
- Dissertation
- Degree Awarded
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
- Degree in
- Occupational and Environmental Health
- Date degree season
- Summer 2025
- DOI
- 10.25820/etd.008121
- Publisher
- University of Iowa
- Number of pages
- xiii, 201 pages
- Copyright
- Copyright 2025 Anna Proctor
- Grant note
This research was funded by the Great Plains Center for Agricultural Health via Grant Number U54 OH007548 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
(59)This research was funded by the Great Plains Center for Agricultural Health via Grant Number U54 OH007548 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
(110)This research was funded by the Great Plains Center for Agricultural Health via Grant Number U54 OH007548 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
(176)- Language
- English
- Date submitted
- 05/21/2025
- Description illustrations
- Illustrations, graphs, charts, tables
- Description bibliographic
- Includes bibliographical references.
- Public Abstract (ETD)
Youth who work on family farms face high risks of injuries. These risks may increase because their homes and workplaces overlap. While we know about the dangers present on farms, there is a need to understand how youth manage and learn about these risks from their parents. This study investigated how parents and their children talk about and handle safety on family farms. We interviewed 15 parent-youth pairs, asking them about safety practices and giving them a short story, a vignette, to see how they would react to a hypothetical farming scenario.
We found that parents and their children usually agreed on ways to stay safe and felt confident they could avoid injuries through their safety rules. However, many did not believe that they or their child were at risk of injury on the farm, so they were unlikely to implement additional safety rules beyond what they already had in place. Several also shared that they do not follow the safety rules on the farm. Parents taught their children to farm through modeling (demonstrating how to do a job), giving instructions, and, rarely, supervising their child. Communication was reported as key to staying safe. The vignette discussion showed that parents and youth thought farm parents were responsible for their child s safety on the farm. The pairs shared inexperience, lack of training, and poor supervision contributed to a higher chance of farm injury. These findings help us understand how young people learn about staying safe while working on their family farms. By looking at how parents and children talk about safety and handle risky tasks, the research findings support efforts to create safer working conditions for youth on family farms.
- Academic Unit
- Occupational and Environmental Health
- Record Identifier
- 9984948642402771