The first domain contained items related to the background of the stakeholders involved in completing the scale, to ensure that these stakeholders were representative of the entire workforce (see Table 2).
A trained and qualified interviewer followed a script tailored to the background of the stakeholders with questions covering the major research topics.
However, the perception and understanding of the provided evidence can be very different depending on the professional background of each stakeholder.
Construction projects involve a wide variety of stakeholders with different backgrounds and interests, and therefore fragmentation is often closely connected with inefficient communication and loss of information (Nawi et al. 2014), culminating in "Information silos" (Hu and Zhou, 2009).
This is particularly critical for certain highly interactive types of socio-technical systems that involve a wide range of stakeholders with disparate backgrounds; system success is often dependent on how well local social constraints are addressed in system design.
As time and distance were not limitations for participation, participants from a variety of groups and contexts took part (26), and it enabled the research team to obtain consensus from a range of stakeholders with differing backgrounds and perspectives, from all over South Africa.
This could be done by a team of stakeholders that essentially have different backgrounds.
This third topic was chosen to highlight the importance of cooperation between the transport system stakeholders as perceived by the workshop participants: i.e. commitment of stakeholders from different fields and backgrounds to cooperate towards the safety goals and also recognition of changing dynamics among the stakeholder groups.
Collaboration by a wide range of stakeholders has resulted in a background of excellent whitepapers on issues of regulatory importance, from which researchers in the field can supplement the formal documents to assemble a regulatory strategy for their product.
In terms of representativeness, and following qualitative understandings of representation, we consider that, overall, this was a sample with a range of sociodemographic backgrounds and a valuable range of diversity in terms of stakeholders' expertise about the issue under investigation.
