Citation

Kvalseth TO. J. Saf. Res. 1983; 14(4): 173-181.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1983, U.S. National Safety Council, Publisher Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

A generalized power model is proposed as a description of the relationship between the frequencies of different classes of accidents and their rank order. In order to test the validity of this model, empirical analyses have been made of reported statistics for total accidents and home accidents as well as for occupational injury or illness. On the basis of these analyses, the proposed frequency-rank relationship appears to be an appropriate empirical model, which provides highly respectable fits to the great majority of the analyzed data. Two of the model parameters account for the frequency variations between ranks and are related to the notion of accident variety (diversity) for which some quantitative measures are proposed. The values of the variety measures are calculated for each set of accident data and some explanations and interpretations are offered.