ABSTRACT
The common cause hypothesis or CCH (that the patterns of failure causes of accidents and near misses are the same) as first proposed by Heinrich (1931) has been little tested over the years (see Hale 2000 and Wright 2002). Despite the lack of testing and evidence for the model the theory appears logical and is illustrated in Van der Schaaf’s (1992) accident causation model (figure 1 below). Although van der Schaaf’s accident causation model provides a common sense view that near misses and actual accidents have the same root causes, the need remains to establish whether or not near misses are indeed precursors to later actual accidents: this ‘common cause’ assumption is the foundation of near miss reporting systems which are found in more and more domains these days. If accidents and near misses have widely different causal pathways then the collection and analysis of near misses will not help decrease the number or severity of accidents. This is an area of great importance for all sectors and may have implications for the usefulness of near miss reporting (van der Schaaf & Wright, 2004).
