# Improvements of Design for Safety in Construction through Multi-Participants Perception Analysis
## 1 Introduction  
The construction industry recorded high injury and fatal incident rates over the past few decades [1; 2; 3]. In the construction industry, according to the '2019 Analysis of Industrial Accident Status' by South Korea's Ministry of Employment and Labor, the number of victims of industrial accidents in 2019 was 25,298, which accounted for 26.9% of all industrial accident victims during that year. In addition, there were 428 fatalities in the construction industry, accounting for 50.1% of all deaths from all industrial accidents for that year [4].  
Many previous studies have been conducted to reduce and eliminate construction accidents focused on construction safety management in the construction phase. Most of the accidents that occur in the construction phase, however, can actually be predicted and prevented in the design phase [5; 6]. Given the increased awareness of the need for construction safety management in the design phase, there has been a paradigm shift in construction safety management from the construction phase to the design phase, whereby all construction project participants, such as the clients, designers, contractors, and construction managers, are involved in construction safety management from the design phase [7; 8; 9].  
Design for Safety (DfS) is a system that takes into account the safety of construction workers from the design phase [10]. DfS is designed to discover risk factors in advance from the design phase and thus to perform risk assessments and establish risk mitigation measures. DfS also refers to activities that reflect the risk factors in the design documents to reduce and eliminate risks [11; 12; 13; 14; 15]. In a similar manner, as the importance of construction safety management in the design phase has been highlighted, DfS has been introduced worldwide. Examples include Construction Design Management (CDM) in the UK, DfS in Singapore, Prevention through Design (PtD) in the U.S., and Safe Design in Australia [11; 12; 13; 14]. These efforts seek to reduce construction accidents by properly implementing each type of DfS [15; 16].  
In South Korea, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport (MLIT) introduced DfS in 2016, and it is currently in operation [17]. As DfS is still in its infancy in South Korea, however, various problems have arisen during its implementation. For example, in South Korea DfS is applied only to certain public construction projects, and it is supposed to be implemented upon 80% completion of the construction document preparation phase. Therefore, DfS in South Korea has many limitations owing to the fact that the applicable range of construction projects is relatively narrow compared to those in other countries [18; 19; 20; 21; 22; 23].  
The DfS process is implemented in the design phase and is carried out in collaboration with multiple participants during its application to the construction phase. During this process, however, participants have different perceptions of DfS problems and the corresponding improvements that are necessary [6; 10; 16; 21; 22; 23; 24; 25; 26; 27; 28]. Therefore, to enhance the effects of DfS, each participant must increase his awareness of DfS and provide suggestions for improvement priorities [28]. Meanwhile, as the career level in the construction industry becomes higher, the overall understanding of DfS increases. Therefore, the DfS problems and needed improvements as perceived by the participants vary depending on the career level in the construction industry [6; 26; 27]. For this reason, researchers can conduct a comparative analysis of perceptions according to career level. Therefore, the present study aims to draw essential DfS improvement alternatives and suggest factors that should be prioritized through a questionnaire survey and to determine the relative importance levels of certain improvements of DfS in South Korea, with the importance levels perceived by a construction project participant and those at different career levels, then compared using weighting factors, respectively.