**13. Summary of the study**

The work has examined the physical ergonomic exposures in the ceiling drywall installation task and has established the ergonomic advantage of working with an assistive device during this task. Finding a solution to reduce the exposures in the ceiling installation task was the focus of the study. The initial results were consistent with previous literature that also showed presence of physical exposures such as handling and lifting heavy drywall panels and suggested the high workload as the reason behind the musculoskeletal injury and illness rates of drywall workers. This is the first study that has evaluated the reduction of these exposures of ceiling drywall installation by implementing the ceiling assistive tool as an intervention.

To date, research on drywall carpentry has mostly focused on the workers in simulated working conditions that either analyzed ideal lifting position of the panels or evaluated tools to assist in carrying the panels. This study, through the analysis of ergonomic observations at the on pre and post intervention phases in real construction workplace settings, evaluated the efficacy of an assistive device for ceiling installation and focused on the drywall installers' during real working conditions at the construction fields, which is rare in drywall installation research.

#### **14. Limitations of the study**

The main limitation of this dissertation was associated with convenience sampling of sites. As discussed in the introduction section of this dissertation, the difficulty of gaining access to sites did not give much choice other than to focus on a sample of convenience. Thus, the study sites were the only ones tested with the research hypothesis. However, due to high consistency in ceiling installation work, the efficacy results of this study should be reproducible at other sites too.

**11**

**Author details**

Priyadarshini Dasgupta

University, Hammond, Louisiana, USA

provided the original work is properly cited.

*The Importance of Exposure Assessment in Blue Collar Jobs: Construction as an Example*

Participatory involvement continues to be a preferred intervention method to reduce the exposure to musculoskeletal risk factors. The workers feel that they are 'empowered' to choose a way of doing the job which makes them more comfortable [17]. This process also makes them able to compare the productivity of the task with

Participatory research can change the lives of the communities as opposed to the academic research. The latter will have a long term effect which can be far away from us. Participatory research has an effect on us while we are doing it. If the research obtains a meaningful data, then an immediate change can be made. The researcher can see the trend and react when community research is obtaining some results and then we can label the change they are having, you can do some perma-

Little research on diffusion or adoption of an innovative tool or technique appears to have been conducted in the area of construction intervention. The relative advantage, observability, complexity and compatibility are four of five important criteria that are perceived by the workers in order to decide if an innovation will be adopted by the workers. Despite the explanatory power of perceived attributes, the reason for the scarcity of an investigation might be related to the pre-test phase of an innovation which is kept in confidence for the sake of market research. Future research could bridge this gap by carrying out a thorough qualitative analysis in measuring the five attributes of perception of the relative advantage

Department of Industrial and Engineering Technology, Southeastern Louisiana

© 2021 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

\*Address all correspondence to: priyadarshini.dasgupta@selu.edu

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.96678*

the proposed method.

nent changes with it.

of an innovation.

**15. Recommendations for future research**

*The Importance of Exposure Assessment in Blue Collar Jobs: Construction as an Example DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.96678*
