Age and gender differences in the attitudes of pre-drivers.

This paper describes work in progress on a GA/ESRC (economic and social research council) project, jointly conducted at Manchester University and Glasgow College, charting age and gender differences in pre- drivers' and young drivers' driving-related attitudes and judgments. There are three components to this project. First, almost two thousand teenagers, from 11 year olds to 19 year olds, recruited through secondary schools in the Manchester and Glasgow areas, have completed a lengthy 2-part questionnaire, data from which is presented here a sub-sample of about 500 of these teenagers also completed the same questionnaire approximately one year after the first administration, providing ngitudinal supplement to the cross-sectional comparisons from the main data-set. Second, almost 300 young drivers, aged from 17 to 21, recruited from further and higher education establishments and large local employers in both the Manchester and Glasgow areas completed another lengthy questionnaire combining material from the pre-driver questionnaire with items pertinent to beginning drivers. Third, a sub-set of both sets of respondents, about 300 in total, have undertaken an interactive video-based task, making judgments and evaluations of several typical traffic scenes viewed from the perspective of a car driver, in order that comparisons may be made between their responses to this driving simulation and their questionnaire responses. In addition, these tasks have been completed by a number of expert drivers, such as traffic police officers, to provide calibration information. The data from all three phases of the project is now to hand, but only that from the first phase has yet been analyzed. While the dimensions underlying teenagers' perceptions of accident causation and riskyness and the age and gender difference therein, are informative, our studies of drivers seem to indicate that ratings of the likelihood of aberrant driving behaviours causing an accident do not cover with their reports of level of commission, but as evidence accrues that drivers are driven by internal, psychological variables - attitudes, mood states, anticipated regret, perceived control over behaviour - it appears increasingly important to track down the sources of such motivations in order to devise levers for shifting them.