A national public health goal is to reduce injuries and deaths from motor vehicle crashes (MVC). The development and psychometric evaluation of the 10-item Driving Practices Questionnaire (DPQ) to measure risky driving is described. Based on responses from 297 drivers divided into safe, unsafe, and injury groups, the DPQ was evaluated using item and factor analysis, and reliability and validity measures. Principle axis factor analysis isolated one factor with 42.3% of the variance explained. The alpha coefficient for the scale was .87 and test-retest correlation was .94. High DPQ scorers were three times more likely to have prior traffic violations. The identification of driver subtypes will assist the testing of injury prevention interventions.
Abstract