Beyond Compliance

Literature on Communication Problems in the Construction Industry

Communication problems in the construction industry are not unique to U.S. workplaces involving Latino laborers. The sui generis nature of conflicting discourse communities in construction sites is an international topic of discussion and research that is probably as old as the construction practice itself. In the “Brown Book,” for example, Wittgenstein (1958) included a scenario involving a construction worker and his supervisor, which he called “builder A and his man B” (p. 77). In Wittgenstein’s example, the construction workers have their own language consisting of the words cube, brick, slab, and column, and he dedicated several pages to analyzing the affordances and restrictions of the profession’s exclusive language.

More recently, at least two books on construction communication have been published in the past decade. The earlier book (Emmitt & Gorse, 2003) analyzes the topic from the perspective of authors in Denmark and England and does not dedicate much discussion to issues of cross-cultural communication on the job. A section on diverse languages in the construction industry initially discusses discrepancies in the terminology used by architects and construction managers. The section then moves to regional dialect and national languages and dedicates a few lines to this cross-cultural communication, arguing that “with the relatively free movement of labour and the use of foreign labour to reduce costs we should anticipate and hence make allowances for some communication difficulties” (p. 28). The latter (Dainty, Moore, & Murray, 2006), also written from the perspective of researchers in England, emphasizes the need to embrace workforce diversification, arguing that the industry faces growing pressure to attract underrepresented groups and to “take advantage” and “exploit” foreign markets as a source of affordable labor. The authors cited the case of Chinese workers in Europe, addressing potential problems related to language skills and cultural knowledge. According to these authors, “effective communication lies at the heart of being able to benefit from the advantages that workforce diversification potentially offers” (p. 225).

Some research has been conducted to improve job-site communication for Hispanic construction workers in the United States. There are some books and materials (including commercial and free products) that address language and culture problems associated with Spanish-speaking construction workers. But most of the available books have an intended audience of English-speaking contractors and supervisors, and they can be grouped into two main categories: construction dictionaries and pronunciation guides of elementary work-related phrases. In the dictionaries category, works by Rosenberg (2006) and the International Code Council, Rolf Jensen, and RSMeans (2006), both titled Spanish/English Construction Dictionary, do not address the needs of the workforce, even if they are effective for translation purposes. In the pronunciation guides category, books such as Eddy and Herrera’s Learning Construction Spanglish (2005) and Rodriguez’s Communicating With Hispanic Workers (2005) assist contractors and supervisors with memorizing basic expressions in Spanish; like the dictionaries, these guides do not emphasize the worker’s perspective. Other communication materials (some developed by nonprofit organizations with grants from OSHA) include Spanish versions with an intended audience of construction workers. Nevertheless, the quality of these materials “is mixed, at best. Most of it is not useful for workers who have limited literacy and little education. Instead, the materials are too technical, too wordy, with little to no graphics to illustrate key points” (Brown, 2003, p. 88).

Other publications on communication problems in the construction industry come from the field of occupational safety and health, reflecting that the most visible consequence of such problems involving Latino construction workers is in their high incidence of workplace injuries and fatalities. In 2002, the National Research Council (NRC) hosted a workshop to support the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)’s plan to develop and disseminate Spanish-language educational materials to Hispanic workers. During the workshop, several panel members emphasized the need for visual content instead of text-heavy translations of documents originally produced in English for an audience of American contractors and supervisors. The panelists’ conclusions included statements such as these:

Recent research on Hispanic construction workers’ occupational safety and health frequently focuses on training and education or accident reporting (Canales et al., 2009; Dong et al., 2010; Williams, Ochsner, Marshall, Kimmel, & Martino, 2010), and only a few studies mention communication as a relevant topic (Dong, Fujimoto, Ringer, & Men, 2009; Menzel & Gutierrez, 2010). Even in those studies, the discussion of communication is reduced to workers’ language proficiency (ability to speak English with a supervisor), and at least one study found that Latino construction workers can communicate with their supervisors “well enough” regardless of language barriers (O’Connor, Loomis, Runyan, dal Santo, & Schulman, 2005). In construction management, training is singled out as a solution for disparities in the incidence of workplace accidents between Hispanics and non-Hispanics; for example, Goodrum (2004) presented statistical differences in the incidence of injuries and fatalities between Hispanic and non-Hispanic workers based on different construction occupations. Hypothesizing that this difference is due to language barriers and discrepancies in formal education between Hispanics and non-Hispanics, he suggested that the increase in the employment of Latinos cannot explain the disproportionate number of accidents for some trades and that the lack of appropriate health-and-safety training programs may be a significant contributing factor.

The literature’s overemphasis on training and education is in clear response to compliance problems with the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, which “is enforced by compliance officers who are authorized by law to enter and inspect your plant or project” (Michaud, 1995, p. 108). Construction contractors are required to train their workforce according to OSHA standards and keep records of the training; however, many OSHA standards do not specify any language requirements. These compliance requirements, combined with a lack of effective training materials for Latino workers, can lead to noneffective training sessions that are conducted in English for a Spanish-speaking audience in order to keep compliance records. In 2010, OSHA’s assistant secretary acknowledged this problem in a memorandum stating that regardless of a standard’s terminology, “the terms ‘train’ and ‘instruct,’ as well as other synonyms, mean to present information in a manner that employees receiving it are capable of understanding” (p. 1). As a result, recent research studies have focused on developing training interventions in Spanish.

Nevertheless, emphasizing training and instruction for compliance purposes only can have negative effects on other key components of a healthy overall workplace communication model. Literature located in the intersection of technical documentation and risk communication can help in the process of understanding and alleviating these negative effects.

Literature on Risk and Safety Communication

Risk communication studies within technical communication address the possibility for miscommunication in large regulatory industries that emphasize training and education for compliance. For a long time, risk communication has served to inform audiences of hazards rather than to discover their values, needs, and prior knowledge about those hazards (Plough & Krimsky, 1987). This approach, which Plough and Krimsky termed as “technocratic,” is an expression of power that subverts the power and knowledge of audiences. Although often disparaged in more recent theories of risk communication (see Leiss & Powell, 2004; Rowan, 1991; Sellnow, Ulmer, Seeger, & Littlefield, 2009, among others), the technocratic approach continues in practice. Audiences frequently react to technocratic risk communication with fear or distrust, which leads to failed communication.

Sauer’s (1996, 2003) work represents the most comprehensive resource in technical risk communication applied to large regulatory industries. Sauer (2003) identified six critical moments of transformation in the cycle of technical documentation in hazardous work environments:

Her research focuses on how individuals who “would not define themselves as writers” engage in tasks to “document, transcribe, abstract, summarize, and synthesize information at each moment in the cycle” (p. 75).

Training is mentioned twice in these six moments, but it is only one of the major components in the cycle. Communicating with workers to obtain and capture their experiences is the first step in the departure from imposed training for compliance. Sauer’s work is based on research conducted at mining sites in the United States and England (1996) and in South Africa (2003), and she lamented that research in cross-cultural risk communication has been limited to nations that share “some affinity with the U.S.” Furthermore, she added that differences in language and culture would make investigations involving communication in non–English-speaking hazardous environments “difficult, if not impossible, in the near future. As a result, we lose the opportunity to understand how documentation functions in these sites and how changes in documentation practices might affect change in policy and procedure” (2003, p. 333). Nevertheless, the communication problems of Latino construction workers already present unique documentation practices and needs in non–English-speaking hazardous environments within the United States. In the technical communication literature, St. Germaine-McDaniel (St. Germaine-Madison, 2009; St. Germaine-McDaniel, 2010) analyzed the specific health communication needs and preferences of U.S. Latinos, contrasting their needs and preferences with those of Spanish speakers in Latin American countries. She concluded that as the number of U.S. Latinos continues to grow, “knowing the rhetorical preferences for this population will become vital for technical communicators and localization experts” (St. Germaine-Madison, 2009, p. 245).

The tension between the participants that Sauer (1998, 2003) reported in her studies also emerges from the conflict between official and tacit, embodied knowledge. Perhaps the most compelling reason for this conflict is the difficulty of capturing workers’ embodied knowledge about safety through means of official training documents that rely primarily on writing and photographs. Although writing itself has been described as an embodied practice (Haas & Witte, 2001), writing cannot fully represent the types of embodied practices performed by miners and construction workers—for example, the gestures used to express how to successfully navigate workplace hazards (Sauer, 1998, 2003). In addition, the removed context through which communicators understand safety is at odds with the direct, real context that their audiences experience. As Sauer (1998) noted, this conflict often results in imposed rules that ignore workers’ practical knowledge and skills that could complement regulatory discourse, a common problem in occupational safety documentation. For instance, tractor operation manuals impose safety rules without learning what might make tractor operators more likely to heed the safety warnings in manuals (Tebeaux, 2010). As a result, judges, lawyers, and other legal authorities read and use information in the manuals more than the presumed audience of tractor operators do.

Such institutional imposition of risk information on audiences is not limited to occupational safety communication: It occurs just as frequently with other types of risk communication. Organizations frequently make it clear through their communication products and processes that individual participation is unnecessary—or, worse, unwelcome. In an analysis of the North Carolina Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management Authority, Katz and Miller (1996) argued that the waste management authority routinely withheld vital documents, relied on political considerations to locate a radioactive waste facility site, and dismissed reactions from members of the affected communities. Each of these actions explicitly conveyed the organization’s power over its audiences, leaving no opening for those audiences to communicate their knowledge and values in a way that would be heeded. These actions are not surprising, given the tendency of this and other organizations to seek to maintain their status as knowledge producers. As Winsor (1990) noted about the Challenger space shuttle accident, “people with power decide what counts as knowledge” (p. 16), and as our study suggests, this exertion of power over local knowledge can have damaging effects on more than just the social relationships between communicators and audiences.

Writing about the image of technical communicators as authors, Slack, Miller, and Doak (1993) presented three views of the practitioner’s role in a communication process: transmission, translation, and articulation. In the transmission view, technical communicators serve as a clear channel that sends technical information “whole cloth” from subject-matter experts to audiences. In this model, which is based on Shannon and Weaver’s (1963) theory of communication, subject-matter experts have significant power over communicators and audiences: Miscommunication is blamed solely on the communicators or their channels of communication, and audiences have no way to provide input to the communicators or the subject-matter experts. Transmission has been heavily critiqued by Miller (1979) and other technical communication researchers but continues to occur in practice. More common in both theory and practice is the translation view, which considers the sending and the receiving of information to be equally important. Slack et al. (1993) described translation as “a process of negotiation in which sender and receiver both contribute—from their different locations in the circuit of communication—to the construction of meaning” (p. 20). In this view, technical communicators serve as mediators of meaning for the audience, giving them a role in the power structure of communication. But the subject-matter expert’s meaning continues to be preferred—and thus privileged—in transmission.

Most official documentation developed for Latino construction workers portrays the work of communicators following the transmission model, clearly showing the senders’ power over the receivers. Even if risk communication products released by OSHA are translated from English to Spanish, their content (and format) reflects a transmission effort, in which the Spanish document is a verbatim version of a text-heavy message originally written in English. A sample fact sheet from OSHA on worker’s rights (see Figure 1) shows an official message transmitted, grammatically correct in Spanish, from an agency in a position of power to an audience that includes many illiterate workers.

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Figure 1.

English and Spanish versions of OSHA’s “Worker Rights Under the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970” fact sheet.

To be effective, the official documentation for Latino construction workers should rely on articulation rather than on transmission or even translation. In the articulation view, communication is an ongoing process in which both meaning and power constantly shift (Slack, Miller, & Doak, 1993). Perhaps most important, articulation is a connection between concepts that “is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time” (Hall as cited in Grossberg, 1986). If the connection is not predetermined (as Hall later noted), then it can be changed. Some meanings will be prioritized at a particular moment but perhaps not in the next. This potential for change provides the crucial space for including the audience in discussions of meaning. But articulation is not an easy process to maintain, as Grabill and Simmons (1998) have noted:

It is one thing to talk about how decision makers should listen and should allow citizens to participate [in discussions of meaning about risk]…. It is an entirely different project to structure as part of the everyday processes of a given institution research designed to facilitate user/citizen participation as legitimate knowledge producers and decision makers. (p. 437)

Technical communicators must be careful not to merely assume the form of articulating information while still primarily transmitting it (Lash & Wynne, 1986/1992; Wardman, 2008). For example, inviting user feedback at the end of a document’s life cycle adopts only the form of articulation because users cannot change meaning in that document or suggest an entirely different use for the document.

Continuing these redefinitions of power balance in discourse, more recent work explicitly ties cultural studies approaches in technical communication to an activist research perspective (Scott, 2003). Like Stratman, Boykin, Holmes, Laufer, and Breen (1995) and Grabill and Simmons (1998), Scott proposed that technical communicators can and should be advocates for their audiences. He noted that this position, though it may be difficult for many researchers and practitioners, remains true to the activist legacy of cultural studies. Bowdon (2004) expanded on this proposal for advocacy in her work with a group attempting to learn how audiences at risk for AIDS consume and understand risk information, arguing that technical communicators “don't have simply the opportunity to engage in textual activism; in many cases [they] have no alternative” to such engagement (p. 326). Bowdon focused on the rhetorical and cultural knowledge brought by technical communicators and how it can inform organizational work with at-risk populations. Similarly, Giles (2010) called for technical communicators to participate in discussions of scientific research, arguing that rhetorical expertise can make risk information that is difficult or potentially sensitive more understandable to audiences.

Even when organizations or government agencies seek to be more inclusive, they often reveal through their actions that audience participation is not vital to the communication process. Their desire for inclusion is often complicated by their need to create and enforce legislation and policy, as suggested by the difficulties experienced by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and residents of Aspen, Colorado (Stratman, Boykin, Holmes, Laufer, & Breen, 1995). Although EPA guidelines called for officials to consider citizens as partners in the process of creating policy, with valuable localized knowledge, representatives of the agency asserted their ownership of any significant knowledge via the agency’s communication about the process; this tension caused local residents and officials to feel alienated from the process. The authors argued that the EPA was primarily guided by its identity as an expert and legal authority, and they rightly recommended that organizations ensure that their official communication adheres to any stated goals for the communication process.

Similarly, Simmons (2007) called for a change in the institutional decision-making process that would reflect both audience and expert knowledge and eliminate the audience’s alienation. Although many institutions demand public participation in discussions of policy (which at times influences or is influenced by perceptions of risk), there is little real push for such participation. Simmons drew on Habermas’s work with the public sphere to declare that “all participation is not equal—encouraging citizens to contribute knowledge about how a policy will affect their community at the onset of a decision-making process is quite different from allowing citizens to respond to policies already determined” (p. 6). What Simmons called for, then, is a truly participatory design (PD) for public policy discussions, in which groups must frequently and consciously rearticulate the meaning and power within the communication process and product, as Slack et al. (1993) indicated.

Returning to the specific case of Latino construction workers, authors on occupational safety and health have also expressed the need to conduct research involving participants from the labor force in actual workplace settings. Brown (2003) and Brunette (2004) emphasized the need for using participatory methods when designing materials for Hispanic construction workers, pointing out that “the involvement of workers in the design, development, and continuous evaluation stages of a research effort is important considering that creative thinking can come from the workers themselves” (Brunette, 2004, p. 246).

Methodology

We conducted this study for the Virginia Tech Occupational Safety and Health Research Center between 2006 and 2011. The project started with the overarching objective of improving workplace communication for Latino construction workers in order to reduce workplace injuries and fatalities, and it included several iterations, revisions, and evaluation sessions. Despite its lengthy duration, this is not a longitudinal study—mainly because of the high turnover of Latinos in the construction industry. Early stages in the study involved the same participants, particularly during the development of information prototypes; however, different teams of workers participated in most of the evaluation-and-feedback sessions.

Discovery Process

In the discovery-process stage, workers and researchers interact in order to envision the future workplace and agree on the desired outcome of the project. For this study, the discovery process took place at all four sites, and it expanded later to two additional residential construction sites in southwest Virginia (with 14 male workers). All 31 workers involved in the initial exploration of work returned for this phase (in two instances, we conducted the exploration and discovery stages on the same day). To generate conversation and reach a desirable level of interaction, this stage used the PD methods of future workshop and organizational game. All participants in this stage were compensated at a rate of $12 per hour.

Future workshop

As a PD technique, future workshops were created “for citizen groups with limited resources who wanted a say in the decision making processes of public planning authorities.” The technique’s goals are to “shed light on a common problematic situation, to generate visions about the future, and to discuss how these visions can be realized” (Kensing & Halskov Madsen, 1991, p. 156). Future workshops have three main stages: (a) critiquing the present, (b) envisioning the future, and (c) implementing changes from the present to the future (Muller, 2008). In these sessions, the workers evaluated the existing safety and communication processes at their job sites, and then, after being asked to imagine an ideal work environment, they generated recommendations for short-term and long-term changes.

The participants were interested in developing and using materials that would lead to a safer job site. But their “envisioned future” indicated that maintaining good communication with their supervisors was, in many cases, even more important than safety measures. The workers mentioned that they would like to see OSHA develop information on “injuries affecting the eyes,” which was a major concern for them. They said that working in groups during their lunch break might give them an opportunity to introduce and review concepts of safety communication. Some imagined a job site in which employers would offer monetary incentives for those who attend training sessions during their lunch hour. In their ideal training sessions, workers would interact with videos (with actors or clay figures) presenting topics of workplace safety with a plot and some elements of humor but no graphic representations of accidents or death. These imagined sessions would separate the workers by trade (roofers, framers, electricians, etc.) and give special attention (for 15 days or a whole month) to new workers. Training would not be limited to safety issues and could include English lessons and adult literacy courses for those workers who cannot read.

Organizational game

The use of organizational games as a PD method is “relatively well established in particular in the Scandinavian tradition” (Iacucci, Kuutti, & Ranta, 2000, p. 194). The objective in using games is “neither to encourage competition nor to teach a theory from above, but [to] support situated and shared action and reflection” (Ehn & Sjorgen, 1991, p. 254). In PD methodology, games “are a way to create a common language, to discuss the existing reality, to investigate future visions” (Ehn & Sjorgen, 1991, p. 252). Thus, in this project we used games to combine the future visions that emerged from the future workshops in order to create visual, nontext-heavy communication solutions to reduce job-site injuries and deaths.

The game selected for this activity was lotería, or Mexican bingo. Lotería is a chance game that has deep roots within the Hispanic community, and the traditions for playing are similar in Mexico and many Latin American countries. According to Villegas and Stavans (2004), the game of lotería is a popular form of entertainment “not only in Mexico but in the western and central parts of the United States. From Oregon to Texas, it is ubiquitous at ferias [carnivals] attended by migrant workers” (pp. xv–xvi). Using lotería, with its sarcastic tone and open use of images such as death and the devil, helped remove taboos associated with injuries and fatalities. Lotería cards have been successfully used for communicating technical information to Spanish-speaking audiences in documented studies. For example, Sheridan-Leos (1995) created the Women’s Health Lotería to promote cervical cancer awareness among Hispanic females in Texas. In Honduras, the Pan American Social Marketing Organization (PASMO) uses a game called Lotería Vive to teach about AIDS (Cohen, 2006). A complete game of lotería has two main components: individual cards with an image, which are equivalent to the numbered balls in bingo, and boards with a grid of images corresponding to those on the cards. The goal was not to have the participants play a game of lotería but to use the concept of visual representation of everyday items and situations to create lotería cards representing what the workers perceived as main workplace hazards. In small groups of three or four, the workers started with a list of the main hazards identified by the NIOSH’s Construction Program (injuries caused by falls, vehicles, noise, or contact with electricity; inhalation exposures to lead, silica, or fumes). The workers were invited to add risks to the list and to create a common visual language to represent those hazardous situations without depending on words in English or Spanish. Workers’ drawings ranged from static stick people to more detailed sequences of events (see Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Sample drawings from participants representing work hazards. Workers, regardless of their talent for drawing, presented their ideas about safety with simple images.

At the end of the discovery-process stage, workers in all of the sessions agreed to be more careful at the job site. They specified that a long-term goal would be to have a comic book, DVD, or laminated card that would inform both new and experienced workers of what they should and should not do when working in order to avoid injuries. After the third session, the idea of a DVD became less popular, as workers claimed that they would not have time to watch it at work and that they were not interested in watching it at home after work. In each of the sessions, at least one worker did not know what OSHA was and was not familiar at all with safety regulations or recommendations from this agency or NIOSH. As a result, we conducted an additional session to study how to combine OSHA standards and regulations with workers’ rhetorical preferences and information needs. This session resulted in a new round of lotería in which we replaced the NIOSH list of hazards with topics from a safety-training course adapted from OSHA’s guidelines (Evia, 2011).

Before moving to the last stage (prototyping), we analyzed the materials gathered in the discovery stage to identify trends in responses and ideas. Statements from the future workshop turned into operational concepts on a list of the most desired workplace changes that could be achieved through improved communication. We then matched the statements, when possible, to drawings from the organizational game in order to create a common language for describing workplace hazards.

Prototyping

In the prototyping stage, “designers and users iteratively shape technological artifacts to fit into the workplace envisioned in Stage 2” (Spinuzzi, 2005, p. 167). Participants in the three prototyping sessions were compensated at a rate of $12 per hour. The first prototyping session took place in the fall of 2007, with a team of six commercial construction workers from Mexico. Because of project funding issues and industry turnover, most of the workers from northern Virginia involved in the first two stages did not participate in the prototyping sessions. Using their workplace-changing statements and visual representations of hazards to avoid, the workers created mock-ups of communication products. In PD projects, mock-ups allow the users to test and give feedback on “technology not yet invented” (Namioka & Rao, 1996, p. 289). The mock-ups transformed the activities conducted during the discovery process into drafts of risk communication products in the form of comic strips, photo comics, information cards, and a television sitcom. In cooperative prototyping, designers and users evaluate the process of interacting with the mock-ups. If there is a breakdown in the process, “users and designers can analyze the situation and discuss whether the breakdown occurred because of the need for training, a bad or incomplete design solution, or for some other reason” (Bødker & Grønbæk, 1991, p. 200). Once the participants used the available images to create a comic strip or screenplay narrative, we worked with them to identify missing pieces and images in order to preserve their mock-up’s message.

A second prototyping session, in the spring of 2008, with a team of six residential Latino construction workers, showed the limited effectiveness of comic strips and photo comics in communicating risk to low-literacy or illiterate participants. Even workers who said they could read in Spanish and had some years of elementary education were not able to follow story lines from the mock-ups created in the first prototyping session. Participants were mostly looking at the drawings or photographs and not actually reading the materials. Thus, to accommodate the Latino workers’ information needs, the preferred genre for communicating safety information was the television sitcom. Participants continued working on prototypes for mini-episodes of a sitcom on topics related to cross-cultural communication about safety with scaffolds, ladders, roofs, and open spaces.

The use of drama in the form of theater or videos in PD creates a strong overlap between the world of end users and the world of developers, “showing concrete projection of ideas from one world into the other world—and, in most uses, allowing modification of those ideas” (Muller, 2008, pp. 1071–1072). With that in mind, the first idea was to have the workers act in the sitcom prototypes, but they did not want to be videotaped. Following a worker’s recommendation from the discovery-process stage, the participants created an animation video with clay figures they developed. But this approach turned out to be extremely time consuming, so they proposed using toys or action figures instead.

With permission from Fisher-Price, the prototype for the sitcom episode on scaffold safety became a 5-minute, stop-motion animated video with Little People^® construction figures. A team of Hispanic graduate students at Virginia Tech used the input from participants to create the video. Prior to the video production, researchers in the Building Construction and Industrial and Systems Engineering programs at Virginia Tech evaluated the script idea for accuracy and safety relevance. It was also evaluated by Latino construction foremen and supervisors and by construction industry representatives on the External Advisory Board of the Virginia Tech Center for Innovation in Construction Safety and Health. The workers’ vision and format stayed intact, and the only recommended changes were to include specific measures and to add guardrails for the scaffold. Figure 3 shows a screen capture of the video.

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Figure 3.

Screen capture of stop-motion animated video on scaffold safety.

Muller (2008) warned that an important consideration in the use of drama in PD concerns whether the product should be seen as a finished piece or a work in progress that is open to changes. Considering the scaffold video as an unfinished product, then, we used the new video in a prototyping session with a team of nine Mexican construction workers from a residential job site in Floyd, Virginia. In group discussions, the participants said that the video had an appropriate balance of entertainment and information and that the characters were relevant to them because “they talk like us.” (See Evia, 2011, for a report of the video’s feasibility and effectiveness as part of a training solution.)

Finally, a team of eight Latino construction workers in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area evaluated the video. In this session, conducted by a graduate student in Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication at the University of Minnesota, the video was presented as a finished piece. The workers watched the video with respectful interest. Their overall opinions seemed to be positive, though the workers were reticent to elaborate on their comments. They offered general remarks, in Spanish, of “it’s nice,” “I liked it,” “very nice.” Although this session did not include a formal evaluation for knowledge transfer, one of the workers made a comment to the effect of “I learned something” (Pigozzi, 2008).

In 2009, a graduate student from the MFA in Creative Writing at Virginia Tech joined the project to improve the conversational tone of worker-developed dialogue in the unproduced scripts on the topics of safety on roofs, on ladders, and cultural differences. Further prototyping sessions were interrupted due to funding limitations. But the video on scaffolds was used twice for training purposes at commercial construction sites in Virginia. As of early spring 2012, we are using an updated version of the first video for a project on the evaluation of safety training materials for Latino construction workers, which we are conducting with faculty members in Construction Management at Colorado State University.

Conclusion and Recommendations

Evaluating PD projects should not be limited to assessing the effectiveness of tangible deliverables (in this case, the scaffold-safety video). Spinuzzi (2005) argued that the combined design-and-research objectives of this type of project must apply three key criteria: (a) quality of life for workers, (b) collaborative development, and (c) iterative process—“despite [the project’s] ceding of power and analysis to users” (2005, p. 169). Although these criteria were extremely important for this project, their complete application was affected by the nature of the construction industry’s quasifirm structure (all the workers who participated in the project were employed by second- or third-level subcontractors), seasonal hiring practices in some trades, and the high turnover of Latino laborers along the U.S. East Coast. In some instances, scheduled prototyping sessions had to be cancelled because companies did not need roofers or framers for months.

Regarding improvements to participants’ quality of life, the main contribution of this project was to communicate concepts about workplace safety to new construction workers who were inexperienced and did not even know about OSHA’s existence. Either through prototypes or through group interaction with their more experienced peers, new workers learned important workplace-safety information in their own language and preferred way for the first time. An indirect contribution to the participants’ improved quality of life, albeit modest, came through the involvement of one of us (Evia) as a corresponding member of the NORA Construction Sector Council as a result of preliminary data from this project. As part of the council, Evia communicated the workers’ needs and tacit knowledge while developing NIOSH’s research agenda for the construction industry. This agenda seeks to identify the most pressing needs of the industry’s workforce and maximize the response to those needs (NIOSH, 2011).

The results of collaborative development in this project are reflected in the video’s themes, which were derived directly from workers’ statements in the discovery-process sessions. These themes include good communication with a supervisor who is accessible and respectful but a firm authority figure, collaboration with peers in a friendly environment that allows playful competition, the importance of workers’ family and home life, elements of humor (involving some use of slapstick, nicknames, and sarcasm), the negative consequences of taking shortcuts and not following directions at work, and the collective goal to protect coworkers and themselves. They did not include graphic representations of accidents and death.

This project also adhered to the iterative process for PD evaluation that Spinuzzi (2005) advocated. It took more than 2 years of prototyping with active participation and reflection before any deliverable was considered as a complete product. And although the scaffold-safety video has occasionally been treated as a final version, three additional episodes are still under development with direct worker participation in ongoing prototyping.

The exigency of the job site creates a communication loop for workers and supervisors. A major goal of the Latino construction workers who participated is to communicate more effectively with their supervisors, which is closely linked to the practical goal of job security. Without being able to communicate with their supervisors, the workers risk not being hired beyond their day-to-day contracts or current projects. In turn, supervisors need workers to comply with regulations, and much of their communication with the workers centers on this need. As a result, many workers perceive that communication and job security are tied to compliance with those regulations. This need for compliance means that the goals of articulation as delineated by cultural studies are rarely completely achieved; to fully meet these goals, workers would probably need to have some say in developing the regulations themselves. But even partial fulfillment of these goals, through participatory translation, can result in a successful project. This participatory translation balances the power between senders and receivers by taking the tacit knowledge of the receivers, the workers, into consideration via methods that encourage early and frequent input.

This call for ongoing participation is echoed in Sauer’s (2003) admonition that effective, ethical safety communication cannot emphasize training at the expense of other stages in the risk-communication process. Any of the stages—local documentation, accident reports, statistical reports, policy and regulations, practices and procedures, and training and instruction—could become a moment of articulation. As Hall (as cited in Grossberg, 1986) argued, these stages thus provide the possibility of change, both positive and negative. As other studies indicate, relationships with participants can also be seriously jeopardized by organizational communication processes (Katz & Miller, 1996; Stratman et al., 1995).

In addition to the broader lessons about risk communication, this project offers relevant recommendations for technical communicators who are developing documentation for Hispanic workers. Some of these recommendations are unique to the study; however, others validate findings about cross-cultural communication with Hispanic and Latin American audiences that have been reported in the technical communication, occupational safety, and business literature. Here are our main recommendations based on this study: