Parents' safety beliefs and childhood agricultural injury

Background: This study examined potential associations between parental safety beliefs and children's chore assignments or risk of agricultural injury. Methods: Analyses were based on nested case-control data collected by the 1999 and 2001 Regional Rural Injury Study-II (RRIS-II) surveillance efforts. Cases (n=425, reporting injuries) and controls (n=1,886, no injuries; selected using incidence density sampling) were persons younger than 20 years of age from Midwestern agricultural households. A causal model served as the basis for multivariate data analysis. Results: Decreased risks of injury (odds ratio [OR] and 95% confidence intervals [CI]) were observed for working-aged children with "moderate," compared to "very strict" parental monitoring (0.60; 0.40-0.90), and with parents believing in the importance of physical (0.80; 0.60-0.95) and cognitive readiness (0.70, 0.50-0.90, all children; 0.30, 0.20-0.50, females) when assigning new tasks. Parents' safety beliefs were not associated with chore assignments. Conclusions: Parents' safety beliefs were associated with reduced risk of childhood agricultural injury; the association was not mediated by chore assignments.