The peak age for pedestrian accidents among school pupils in the UK is between 12 and 14 years, following the transition to secondary school, and after children have apparently become relatively competent at interacting with traffic. The reason why vulnerability should increase when underlying skills have improved is unclear. A better understanding of the processes at work is therefore needed in order to determine what steps might be taken to counteract this problem. One contributing factor may be that young adolescents’ road-crossing skills are first acquired in the quieter environments around primary schools. As a result of this, pupils may in fact be inadequately prepared for dealing with the busier roads that surround secondary schools, especially when they are typically no longer accompanied by parents. This problem may be compounded by adolescents thinking that they are more able than is actually the case, because of a widespread tendency to regard road safety as an issue that only concerns primary school children. As a result, they may fail to notice any need to adjust their behaviour to the more demanding conditions which they now face. In addition, a bias among adolescents towards rule-breaking as part of attempts to establish an identity distinct from that of their parents may actually lead to deliberate risk-taking by some. This report details two studies designed to unravel which of these factors contributes most to increases in unsafe pedestrian behaviour between the ages of 11 and 15 years. Study 1 focused on whether young adolescents do, in fact, have limited skills for dealing with more complex traffic environments; and whether, in spite of this, they underestimate the difficulty of road-crossing decisions, and ignore signs that their performance is less adequate than they believe. (Author/publisher)
Abstract