ABSTRACT
In 1994, Nancy Krieger from the US wrote a paper entitled Epidemiology and the Web of Causation: Has Anyone Seen the Spider? (Krieger, 1994). In it Krieger described the implicit reliance in much of epidemiological theory and practice on what she called the ‘framework of biomedical individualism’ to guide the choice of factors incorporated in the thinking of epidemiologists and hence in the study designs they use. Krieger argued that it was more important to question the whereabouts of the putative spider, who was creating and spinning the web. She was pointing out that focusing on the micro-level misses the bigger picture in which the societal factors influence what happens at the individual level. This has important implications for those in the field of occupational safety and expresses the rationale for the studies to be described. They will show correlations between what happens at the workplace level and injury rates within those worksites.
