Abstract
In order to examine the accidents involving organic solvents from 1995 to 2006 in Japan, all the cases were classified into 3 types of industry (construction, manufacturing, and other service industries), 12 types of work, 13 types of causes, and 5 types of unified causes. The relationship among the types of industry, the types of work, and the causes of the accidents were analyzed by the use of the Kruskal's multi-dimensional scaling method. All the analytical results were presented on a two-dimensional distribution in which both the abscissas and the ordinates were originally defined. All the data allocated in the distribution were classified into 3 or 4 groups in order to analyze the background information of the organic solvent accidents. We found that Kruskal's multi-dimensional scaling analysis is suitable for revealing the essence of a small number of miscellaneous cases, such as organic solvent accidents.
