Center for Health & Safety Culture

The Center for Health & Safety Culture is an interdisciplinary center within the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University serving communities and organizations through research, training and support services to cultivate healthy and safe cultures. Our research seeks to learn and share how to effectively address these areas of action from a cultural perspective. Most of our research projects focus on three core areas of public health: traffic safety, substance abuse, and violence (including child maltreatment).

We believe a cultural approach to public health is critical. Behavior does not occur in isolation of one’s environment, and efforts that embrace a cultural approach are much more likely to be
sustained.

One area of our research involves developing, refining, and sharing a framework for improving health and safety using a cultural approach called the Positive Culture Framework.

The Positive Culture Framework (PCF) is a structure for improving health and safety. PCF addresses key skills (the “how”), steps in a process (the “what”), and the context for doing the work (the “where”).