The risk group of 18-24 year olds continues to be at highest risk of being injured or killed in a traffic accident. This fact justifies the need to devote attention to the improvement of road safety for this age group in the future. Various methods are sensitising young drivers with regard to the dangers of road traffic and thereby changing their attitudes and behaviour for the long term. The present study is directly linked to the JUFA (youth and family) study by the Federal Highway Research Institute (BASt) from 2012. Vulnerable groups of young drivers emerged from the comprehensive descriptions. With the continuation of the JUFA study, three central aims followed: (1) a greater differentiation of lifestyle groups through the incorporation of values and attitudes, (2) a differentiated characterisation of media use as the basis for the development of group-specific communication, and (3) the analysis of the connection between personality traits, lifestyles, expectations related to traffic safety, and various forms of media use. To achieve these goals, a representative survey (N = 1,995) was conducted in the target group of 15 to 24 year olds. The expansion of the lifestyle definitions to values and attitudes resulted in the identification of nine lifestyle groups that differ significantly from one another in terms of the hazards in road traffic. Two different self-reliant types emerged through the differentiation of the lifestyle groups. The highest accident risk exists for the "car-centred type A", which has large similarities with the lifestyle type of the same name from the JUFA study. Aside from the traditional media that reports on entertaining motoring topics, people of this lifestyle group can be reached via mobile phones, mobile apps and social networks. Their relatively low interest in road safety makes it necessary to engage in risk communication with an appropriate strategy and "packaging" in order to reach this target group. The testing of the theoretical model of this study within the framework of the path analyses revealed a very good adaptation to the empirical data for all lifestyle groups and both genders. These results once again support the theoretical basis developed in the JUFA project and recommend its use in future research and for the implementation of measures in the field of risk communication. For such an implementation, in which target-group-specific strategic and conceptual aspects are taken into account, the high degree of differentiation between the descriptions of the nine lifestyle groups provide a broad empirical basis. (Author/publisher)
Abstract