Here are some tips Carollo, Hick and Shulyakovskaya offer for handling OSHA data.
Use ZIP codes. "Some companies had many, many locations," Carollo said. "If you used company names, like General Motors, you'd end up with a zillion hits. We used ZIP codes to identify locations."
Look for deaths. "One of the more interesting queries is to look for citations that result from fatalities," Carollo said. "Once you've got those, you can get all the paperwork on it because somebody's dead. Then rank those in order of monetary fines."
Find the survivors. "Look through the data field of fatalities, find the names and look up the survivors early on," Hick said. "It helped me focus my story and focus my interviews."
Keep it simple. "It's a pretty complicated database," Carollo said. "Definitely make the queries simple."
Look for what is NOT in the data. Casey and Carollo suspected that not all workplace deaths were recorded with OSHA. They confirmed their suspicion by comparing the data with state medical examiners' reports in Oklahoma and Arkansas. "I picked states that had a coroner's office that had good records," Carollo said.
Examine penalty fields carefully. "There are actually three different amounts of penalties that you will see for each inspection," Shulyakovskaya said. "The first comes from the OSHA table; it's called 'total current penalties' and represents the initially assessed fine. Second is the 'current penalty reflecting changes and modifications,' which indicates the fine negotiated between the company and OSHA. It appears in the violations table. Third is the 'total penalty dollars remitted for the inspection,' which is what was actually paid. This appears in the OSHA table.
"Often, the difference is drastic," she said. "There are two obvious reasons: Employees abate regulations or go into litigation."
Look out for "deleted" records. "OSHA has a habit of leaving records marked for deletion in the database with a flag," Shulyakovskaya said. "Look for the 'delete' field in the violations table where (existing) records are marked for deletion."
Inspected or not? "We discovered that about 4,000 records a year have no inspections," Hick said. The records are listed in the OSHA table, but the companies have not been inspected. The lack of inspection — which may result, for example, because the business closed or because it refused entry to the OSHA inspector — is noted in the field referred to in the record layout as "Why-no inspec." While this may not alter overall trends, not noting it may skew specific calculations.
Take advantage of SIC codes. "I didn't get into looking at OSHA for dangerous occupations because the occupation field is rarely filled in," Hick said, "but standard industrial codes (SIC) are listed. These are standard codes used throughout federal government. SIC codes indicate how the industry is classified in the federal bureaucracy. You can find out which types of industries have the most fatalities."
Use clipping services. "You'll get clippings from tiny, tiny weeklies that otherwise get ignored. If you're doing a national project, there is no better way to find anecdotes," Carollo said. "It might be a brief in some paper in South Dakota and you get this great material."
Jo Craven can be reached at (314) 882-0684, or send e-mail to c655034@mizzoul.edu