Young workers and safety: A critical review and future research agenda.

Introduction: Research on young worker safety often relies on inconsistent definitions of young workers and poorly delineated indicators of occupational safety. This review aims to reconcile these fundamental issues by critically integrating research across disciplines and providing clear directions for future research on young worker safety.
Method: We critically review the extant research on young worker safety.
Results: We first reconcile the inconsistent definitions of young workers and specify the indicators of occupational safety used in young worker safety research. We next describe the prevalence of workplace injuries and population-level predictors of these injuries among young workers and then outline other factors that increase young workers' susceptibility to workplace injuries. Finally, we discuss the convergence of many of these issues on family farms-a context commonly studied in young worker safety research.
Conclusions: Clearer definitions of young workers and indicators of occupational safety can improve the interpretation and comparability of extant research findings. Furthermore, the prevalence of workplace injuries and population-level predictors of injury among young workers are subject to the interactions among age, gender, minority status, and job characteristics. Other factors that increase young workers' susceptibility to injury include young workers' responses to hazardous work, individual differences stemming from young workers' biological and psychological development, managerial attitudes about young workers, and the limited safety training young workers are thus provided, the types of work that young workers typically perform, and the range of social influences on young workers.
Practical Applications: Safety campaigns and safety training should consider interactions among young workers' age, gender, minority status, and job characteristics, rather than considering these features independently.
Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
(Crown Copyright © 2022. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)