A practical approach was developed to assess and compare the effects of five short road safety education (RSE) programmes for young adolescents that does not rely on injury or crash data but uses self reported behaviour. Questionnaires were administered just before and about one month after participation in the RSE programmes, both to youngsters who had participated in a RSE programme, the intervention group, and to a comparable reference group of youngsters who had not, the reference group. For each RSE programme, the answers to the questionnaires in the pre- and post-test were checked for internal consistency and then condensed into a single safety score using categorical principal components analysis. Next, an analysis of covariance was performed on the obtained safety scores in order to compare the post-test scores of the intervention and reference groups, corrected for their corresponding pre-test scores. It was found that three out of five RSE programmes resulted in significantly improved self-reported safety behaviour. However, the proportions of participants that changed their behaviour relative to the reference group were small, ranging from 3% to 20%. Comparisons among programme types showed cognitive approaches not to differ in effect from programmes that used fear-appealThe purpose of this study is to provide an overview of the variation in the prevalence of alcohol in everyday traffic in the Netherlands during all days of the week and all times of day. Breath tests were taken from randomly selected car drivers and drivers of small vans in six police regions in the Netherlands between January 2007 and August 2009. A total of 28,057 drivers were included in the study. The prevalence of driving under the influence of alcohol was highest during night-time hours of weekend days. Large proportions of sampled drivers under the influence of alcohol were also found during day-time hours on weekend days, especially early in the morning and early in the evening. Furthermore, a small proportion of sampled drivers under the influence of alcohol was found during morning traffic on Monday and Friday mornings. The results of this study indicate that drink driving is not only limited to night-time hours and that prevalence of drink driving is also high during evening hours from Wednesday to Sunday. In addition to these time periods, breath testing activities may also be effective from a police enforcement perspective on Monday, Friday, and Saturday mornings between 06.00 h and 08.00 h and on Sunday mornings until 10.00 h. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting