There is no abstract for this article. The text below is the first paragraph of text within the article. The literature on motor vehicle safety is vast. Consequently the review effort reported in this supplement was Herculean in scope and difficulty. It introduced me to many solid and important effectiveness studies. At the same time, it occasionally omitted effectiveness studies that I cite. Returning to my sources heightened my appreciation of the Task Force on Community Preventive Service's (the Task Force) trials. The first trial was finding the studies. Two examples are informative. A National Centre for Health Statistics publication finds that 92% of low-income parents who own child safety seats use them routinely. That report, however, covers a wide range of parental safety practices. It lacks keywords and is not indexed. Again, an article in an economics journal uses confidential 1983 National Personal Transportation Survey microdata to analyse how people make decisions about using motor vehicle safety equipment. The paper includes a logit regression explaining child seat use. One explanator is residence in a state with a child safety seat use law (in force in 1983 in 15 states housing 38.5% of the 934 respondents with children under age 5). The model focuses on the influence of individual factors like parent age, income, and education on seat use decisions, but in the process it produces the best extant evaluation of the impact those laws had on seat use. It finds that laws increased seat belt use by 42.3%, with 17.7% diverted from belts and 24.6% restrained for the first time. These findings, however, are by-products. They do not appear in the abstract and merit only one sentence in the text. To the author, a restraint law was just another regression coefficient. How could a systematic search find these studies? (A)
Abstract