Computer assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) were employed to contact a random sample of households in Victoria. Details were asked of everone in the household about any involvement in: a road accident during the previous 3 years, where at least one person was injured sufficiently to require medical treatment; and/or a property damage only (PDO) road accident during the previous year. There were 4,864 households contacted in Melbourne and 3,597 households contacted in the rest of Victoria which produced details from 16,843 people. The major research findings with regard to injury from road accidents were: the number of people recorded on the police accident database was only 78% of the total number of such accident involvements estimated by the survey. Thus the police reporting rate for all injury accident involvements in Victoria was estimated to be 78% of the true level. The number of PDO accidents per year per resident was estimated as 59 people in 1000. People living in Melbourne also reported 9.7 times the number of PDO road accident involvements as injury accidents involvements (compared with 6.8 times as many for people living in the rest of Victoria and 8.8 times as many for all Victorians). (A)
Abstract