Citation

Brault M, Dussault C. Proc. Int. Counc. Alcohol Drugs Traffic Safety Conf. 2002; 2002: 1181-1188.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2002, The author(s) and the Council, Publisher International Council on Alcohol, Drugs and Traffic Safety)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

While studying the contribution of alcohol or drugs to the risk of accident, researchers have often encountered the problem of lack of road exposure data. Responsibility analysis has tried to overcome this problem and to allow for a good estimate of the risk of accident. Over the last 20 years, developments have led to the use of two main methods. According to the first (1,2) a panel of judges is asked to evaluate the responsibility of the driver on a 5-degree scale. The second method (3,4) uses a scoring guideline that assesses responsibility based on eight mitigating factors. The total score (between 8 and 26) is used to deem a driver to be culpable, contributory or non-culpable. Both methods imply responsibility evaluation without knowledge of drugs or alcohol consumption by the driver. The main goal of this study is to compare these two methods with the same sample of data to identify the differences, the advantages and the disadvantages of both methods. In close to 4 out of 5 cases, drivers involved in accidents scored the same for extent of responsibility regardless of the method used. However, in cases where the results diverge, we noted that the factors accounting for the difference concerned mainly the weather and condition of the vehicle.