Citation

Brietzman S, Carter P, Dunn LB, Fine M, Gill T, Gilmartin S, Gomez T, Hopkins JE, Jones G, Kirk AP, Kissinger JP, Martin J, McDonald EM, Robinson I, Shaw S, Sleet DA, Yellman MA, Safe States Alliance. Safe States Alliance. Atlanta, GA, USA: Safe States Alliance (USA), 2019.

Copyright

(Copyright 2019, Safe States Alliance)

The full document is available online.

Abstract

Motor vehicle crashes currently rank as the second leading cause of death and the fourth leading cause of injury among the adult population (National Center for Statistics and Analysis, 2018). Because motor vehicle-re- lated deaths affect the young, they are also responsible for significant years of productive life lost. Rather than focusing specifically on the driving behaviors themselves, this resource document examines underlying risk factors (e.g., those that make it more likely for an individual to engage in risky driving behaviors) and protective factors (e.g., those that make it more likely for an individual to engage in safe driving behaviors) to identify high-leverage opportunities for reducing the burden of motor vehicle-related injuries and fatalities. These approaches extend beyond the individual-level to include an understanding of the interconnectedness of social elements in an environment across the lifespan. These approaches also highlight effective strategies for facilitating behavior change and for the use of data to support surveillance and evaluation activities.

The purpose of this resource is to provide public health and traffic safety professionals with recommendations for: applying the shared risk and protective factors approach to reduce risky driving behavior, identifying interventions that can address these risk and protective factors to prevent motor vehicle-related injuries and fatalities, and utilizing data resources to measure the impact of these strategies.

To achieve this purpose, a variety of concepts are presented throughout the report, including:

• A brief overview of how the public health approach is a useful framework for inves- tigating and understanding the causes of motor vehicle-related injuries and fatalities

• Key definitions of risk factors, protective factors, behavior change strategies, and evidence-based strategies that have been adapted from agencies that represent international and federal-level perspec- tives on public health, mental health, and public safety (p. 14).

• An explanation of the benefits associated with connecting shared risk and protective factors across the various levels of social ecology, including broad examples of strategies that can address risk factors and promote protective factors within each level of the social ecological model (p. 16).

• An explanation of how to apply the shared risk and protective factors approach to driver safety to address multiple health outcomes across the lifespan of an individual (p. 18).

• A shared risk factors grid that observes the trends that exist among the social ecolog- ical model and displays the connections between risk factors and unsafe driving behaviors (p. 20).

• A shared protective factors grid that observes the trends that exist among the social ecological model and displays the connections between protective factors and driving behaviors (p. 24).

• An explanation of how behavior change can occur when aligning evidence-based strategies to a shared risk and protective factors approach, including guidance on distinguishing between levels of evidence, tailoring interventions or strategies to the ...