Objective: Developing a strong safety culture is a critical strategy for coal enterprises to address persistent safety challenges. However, existing approaches to safety culture construction face two major limitations: ambiguity in the conceptual definition of "safety culture" and a lack of clarity regarding its interaction mechanisms with other organizational safety elements. These limitations hinder the full realization of the safety culture's preventive role in accident reduction. To overcome these issues, this study proposes a safety culture construction method based on the 24Model, followed by an empirical investigation using data collected from coal enterprises. Methods: First, the theoretical framework of the 24Model was applied to clarify the connotation of safety culture and elucidate its interaction mechanisms with other organizational safety elements. Second, a safety culture analysis program was employed to collect and verify 3 482 valid questionnaires from 19 coal enterprises in China. Third, the influence of various factors on safety culture levels was systematically examined across three dimensions: individual characteristics (gender, years of service, and education level); industry-wide safety level; and four functional position groups (managers, professionals, team leaders, and frontline workers). Based on the empirical findings, targeted strategies for improving safety culture levels were proposed. Results: No statistically significant difference in safety culture scores was found between male and female employees. Employees with more than 10 years of service scored significantly higher than those with ≤2 years or 2-5 years of service, and those with higher education levels scored significantly higher than those with lower education levels. The overall safety culture score of the sampled enterprises was 78.19, which is slightly higher than the national average for other industries (77.74). A comparative analysis of the evaluation results of 32 safety culture elements across four functional position groups, benchmarked against enterprises with superior and poor safety performance, revealed the following: elements such as "role of the safety department" "approach to safety performance" and "role of safety organization" consistently scored low across three groups; elements including "community safety impact" "care for injured employees" "understanding of safety performance" "relationship between safety performance and human resources" and "overall safety expectation" showed deficiencies in two groups; and elements such as "importance of safety" "perception of safety investment" "formation of safety values" "leadership responsibility" "employee participation" "training needs" "quality of safety meetings" "implementation of safety procedures" "types of safety inspections" "safety management of subsidiaries and contractors" and "emergency response capability" fell below expectations in one group. Conclusions: The empirical results demonstrate that both years of service and education level are significantly and positively correlated with safety culture levels in coal enterprises. Furthermore, systematic differences were observed among the four functional position groups in their understanding of specific safety concepts. Based on these insights, a three-stage safety culture enhancement strategy and a dual-path improvement framework integrating reconstruction of the safety management system and enhancement of employee safety competence were proposed. This framework provides a systematic and practical approach for strengthening safety culture in coal enterprises.