A total of 420 slaughterhouse butchers participated in this study. The mean age of the participants was 40.44 ± 10.23 SD. Moreover, the mean work experience of the participants was 14.52. The results revealed that 49% of the butchers lived in rural areas, 17.1% were not married and 13.8 were illiterate. Table 1 show the prevalence of each high risk behavior.
Given the seven observed variables, there could exist 128 response patterns. The fitness of the LCA model was investigated by seven variables for one-class to six-class models, and the relevant indices of each model are presented in Table 2. According to the fitness indices and interpretability of the results, the three-class model was preferred in this study. Table 3 shows the LCA model’s output for the three classes. This table consists of two sections. The first section shows the prevalence of each of the latent classes. As observed in Table 3, 16.1% of the participants were located in the first class, 53.6% in the second class and 30.2% in the third class. The second section of Table 3 depicts the probability of each of the indicator variables. To present a more exact description of each class, the detailed characteristics of each class need to be elaborated:
The first class (low-risk)
The probability of the occurrence of high risk behaviors to the participants in this class was low and below 50%. Nevertheless, it should be mentioned that the probability of having a history of contact with animals’ carcass, blood or red meat was 44% in this class, which is still a noticeable amount. Yet, the probability of not using protective gloves, masks and goggles as well as having a history of physical contact with ticks was the lowest amount possible across all classes.
The second class (high-risk)
The probability of not using gloves, work clothes and boots as well as having contact with animals or holding the knife in the mouth while dressing animals was below 50% in this class. However, other high risk behaviors had a high probability in this class. It needs to be mentioned that not using work clothes and boots as well as holding the knife in the mouth while dressing animals in this class had the lowest probability across all classes.
The third class (very high-risk)
The probability of holding the knife in the mouth was low in this class. Likewise, having a history of physical contact with ticks was below 50% in this class. The other observed variables, however, had a high probability amount so that the probability of a history of contact with animals’ carcass, blood or red meat was 100% in this class. Similarly, the probability of not using protective gloves, masks and goggles were 90%, about 100% and 98.3%, respectively, in this class.
Table 4 demonstrates the odds ratios of membership in each latent class. As can be seen, an increase in age raised the odds of being in the third class by 1.07. On the other hand, an increase in work experience could decrease the odds of being in the third class by 0.91. The results of the study revealed that by controlling the effect of other variables, the perceived self-efficacy score could decrease the odds of being in the second and third classes compared to the first class. Hence, the odds of being in latent class 2 and 3 in comparison to the class 1 was 0.74 and 0.62 respectively.