Sogand Hasanzadeh

Purdue University | Purdue · School of Civil Engineering

This paper aims to compare and analyze construction practitioners' perceptions concerning the influence of project delivery methods (PDMs) and procurement methods (PMs) on various project outcomes, including team chemistry, construction quality, construction productivity, change orders, and overall project success. Using a convenience sampling surv...

Productivity demands, time pressure, and cognitively demanding construction tasks increase workers' arousal and stress; however, it is not clear how these factors may worsen risk compensation effects and lead to unanticipated hazards. This paper examined the extent to which limited time and increased mental load amplify the risk compensatory behavi...

Risk propensity, or individuals’ attitude toward risk, can highly impact individuals’ decision-making in high-risk environments since those who merely focus on positive consequences associated with high-risk acts are more likely to engage in risk-taking behaviors. Previous studies identified activation in the prefrontal cortex during decision-makin...

This study investigated the moderating effect of personality traits in the association between worker characteristics (work experience, training, and previous injury exposure) and hazard-identification performance through mechanisms of visual attentional indicators. Through an integrated moderated mediation model, the attentional distribution, sear...

Recent research suggests construction workers fall prey to the cognitive biases of risk compensation, wherein workers offset safety improvements by taking more risks. Parallel previous literature indicates that time pressure and mental load may increase workers’ arousal and stress. However, it is unclear whether time, productivity, and/or cognitive...

Ethical aspects of stakeholder behavior can have a wide range of implications for other areas of project management. This research critically reviewed project ethics under the philosophical paradigm change from modernism to late modernism, which led to a flexible and realizable ethical framework based on Levinasian and Nietzschean moral psychologie...

Due to the dynamic nature of construction sites, workers face constant changes, including changes that endanger their safety. Failing to notice significant changes to visual scenes-known as change blindness-can potentially put construction workers into harm's way. Hence, understanding the inability or failure to detect change is critical to improvi...

This study examines the entire life-cycle of best-value projects to identify factors that can help key stakeholders build collaborative teams. Fifteen design-build projects (three medical, five offices, four educational, and three lodging buildings) that were procured using best-value were selected. For each project, knowledgeable stakeholders (i.e...

The feasibility process of public construction projects is under the influence of stakeholders, who give direction to public resource allocation. Therefore, the analysis of stakeholders in this process is critical. An inductive qualitative approach was adopted using the grounded theory method to provide a theoretical explanation of stakeholders’ be...

Despite widespread acclaims for their potential to curb the number of injuries occurring in the construction industry, safety interventions and technological advances appear to have failed to fully achieve their safety objectives, perhaps due to risk-compensation effects, i.e., the possibility that workers protected by these interventions will incr...

While researchers have dispensed considerable effort in the past decades to reduce the risk of occupational injuries in the construction industry, the large amount of safety incidents occurring each year indicate that many of the safety interventions and technological advances have not fully achieved their safety goals. This fact suggests the possi...

Cognitive processes have been found to contribute substantially to the human errors that lead to construction accidents. Working memory-a cognitive system with a limited capacity that is responsible for temporarily holding information available for processing-plays an important role in reasoning and decision-making. Since eye movements indicate whe...

One of the main contributors to the human errors that lead to catastrophic injuries in the construction workplace is the failure to identify hazards as a result of poor attention or cognitive lapses. To address this safety concern, the present study used eye-tracking technology to assess how the association between work experience and hazard identi...

Immersive environments have been successfully applied to a broad range of safety training in high-risk domains. However, very little research has used these systems to evaluate the risk-taking behavior of construction workers. In this study, we investigated the feasibility and usefulness of providing passive haptics in a mixed-reality environment t...

The annual cost of winter maintenance in the United States is approximately $2.3 billion, which makes measuring the performance of state departments of transportation (DOTs) a financially responsible and mission-critical task to improve services, strengthen accountability, and provide better information for effective decision making and resource al...

Workers' attentional failures or inattention toward detecting a hazard can lead to inappropriate decisions and unsafe behaviors. Previous research has shown that individual characteristics such as past injury exposure contribute greatly to skill-based (e.g., attention failure) and perception-based (e.g., failure to identify and misperception) error...

Despite substantial efforts to address fall prevention and curb the number of injuries that occur in the construction industry, this sector still experiences the highest fatality rates among all industries. The fact that injuries still occur even after implementing these interventions highlights the need to determine whether providing more safety p...

Severe weather conditions, especially snow and ice during the winter season, threaten surface transportation nationwide and impact roadway safety and mobility. In particular, snow and ice decrease pavement friction and vehicle maneuverability, causing slower speeds, reducing roadway capacity, and increasing crash risk. These stressors make road mai...

Adverse weather conditions are responsible for millions of vehicular crashes, thousands of vehicular deaths and billions of dollars in economic and congestion costs. Many transportation agencies utilize a performance or mobility metric to assess how well they are maintaining road access. This research focuses on the development of a winter severity...

The risk of major occupational accidents involving tripping hazards is commonly underestimated with a large number of studies having been conducted to better understand variables that affect situation awareness: the ability to detect, perceive, and comprehend constantly evolving surroundings. An important property that affects situation awareness i...

Disputes are common in the construction industry and lead to unnecessary cost and schedule overruns in projects. It is commonly believed that owners’ early decisions regarding the selection of delivery methods, procurement methods, and contract types affect the frequency and severity of project disputes; however, no previous study has empirically t...

A worker’s attentional and cognitive failures—such as lack of attention, failure to identify a tripping hazard, or misperception about a hazard’s risks—can lead to unsafe behaviors and, consequently, accidents. Previous literature has shown that individual characteristics such as personality may affect human’s selective attention. However, few stud...

Disputes are common in the construction industry and lead to unnecessary costs and schedule overruns in projects. While many believe that project stakeholders’ early involvement in projects impact performance metrics such as the frequency and severity of disputes over a project, no previous study has empirically tested this hypothesis. Therefore, t...

The majority of human-factor models in construction safety assume that risk-taking behaviors, failure to perceive hazards, or misinterpreting the associated risks of hazards are the main contributing factors in accident occurrences. However, the findings for the link between risk-taking behaviors and risk perception are inconsistent. To address thi...

Disputes are common in the construction industry and lead to unnecessary cost and schedule overruns in projects. It is commonly believed that owners’ early decisions regarding the selection of delivery methods, procurement methods, and contract types affect the frequency and severity of project disputes; however, no previous study has empirically t...

Eye-movement metrics have been shown to correlate with attention and, therefore, represent a means of identifying and analyzing an individual’s cognitive processes. Human errors—such as failure to identify a hazard—are often attributed to a worker’s lack of attention. Piecemeal attempts have been made to investigate the potential of harnessing eye...

Identifying hazardous situations is a complex and multidimensional cognitive process that requires the proper allocation of workers' attention. Eye-tracking technologies provide a viable option for studying construction workers' attentional allocation and for linking attention to their hazard-identification capabilities. The objective of the study...

Cognitive processes have been found to play a significant role in contributing to the human errors that lead to construction accidents. A better understanding of cognitive processes as they relate to construction will elucidate the more predictable varieties of human fallibility and allow for the creation of strategies to avoid said errors. To date...

Although several studies have highlighted the importance of attention in reducing the number of injuries in the construction industry, few have attempted to empirically measure the attention of construction workers. One technique that can be used to measure worker attention is eye tracking, which is widely accepted as the most direct and continuous...

Human error is one of the main causal factors in up to 80% of all accidents across various industries. Failures of cognitive processes (i.e., attention and memory failure) have been found to make a significant contribution to the human errors that lead to construction accidents. A better understanding of cognitive processes as they relate to constr...

Disputes are common in the construction industry and lead to unnecessary cost and schedule overruns in projects. It is commonly believed that as the level of trust increases among project stakeholders, the frequency and severity of disputes decrease in a project; however, no previous study has empirically tested this hypothesis, especially in highw...

Eye-tracking technology is an emerging methodology that has the potential to transform current practices in measuring workers’ situation awareness (SA). Since eye movements are assumed to indicate where a worker’s attention is directed, tracking such movements provides a practical way to measure workers’ attention and comprehension of construction...

While recent studies suggest that there is a relationship between indicators of project integration—such as early involvement of constructors—and the quality of project health and safety outcomes, there is no study that empirically investigates this relationship. To address this limitation in the current body of knowledge, the purpose of this paper...

Best-value is a procurement method that combine price and non-price factors when selecting a contractor or design-builder. While, several researchers have evaluated the impact of best-value selection on project outcomes—such as cost, schedule, and quality—there are a limited number of studies that qualitatively evaluate the experience of different...

Although there are several studies that have highlighted the importance of attention in reducing the number of injures in the construction industry, few studies have attempted to empirically measure the attention of construction workers. One of the techniques that can be used to measure workers' attention is eye-tracking. Eye-tracking is widely acc...

Studies in construction procurement methods show that there needs to be a change of culture and attitude in the construction industry, moving from traditional adversarial relationship into cooperative and collaborative relationship. Complexity, uncertainty and time pressure that characterize construction projects are increasing the need for this ch...

Since some of the recent prominent change faced by the construction industry, collaborative procurement has been prosperous in recent years. This new approach has been proved widely applicable within construction projects of United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, Turkey, Sweden, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Japan; however, Applicati...