Citation

Kulanthayan S, Nasir M, Musa A, Hariza A, Radin Umar RS. Proc. Road Saf. Four Continents Conf. 2005; 13: 12p.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2005, Conference Sponsor)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

A study was conducted in four states of Malaysia, Johor (the southern region), Selangor (the central region), Kedah (the north region) and Terengganu (the east region) to assess the effectiveness of the helmet wearing, child helmet, conspicuous clothing and illegal racing advertisements aired on national television as part of a motorcycle safety campaign undertaken by the Ministry of Transport, Malaysia. A total of 650 male motorcyclists, ranging in age from 18 to 40 years, were interviewed in a survey conducted in November and December 2001 before the launching of the advertisements (pre-survey). A similar survey (post survey) was conducted 7 to 8 months later in July 2002 and 507 of the original sample responded giving a response rate of 78.0%. Results showed that 94.4% of the respondents were aware of the road safety campaign, and of these 97.7% stated that their main source of information on the road safety campaign was the television. In general, knowledge and attitude of the respondents with respect to the messages of the helmet wearing and illegal racing has improved significantly over the period of more than half a year of airing them. This shows that the campaign succeeded in creating awareness, which led to an increase in the knowledge and attitude scores for the helmet wearing and illegal racing advertisements. However, for messages on child helmet and conspicuous clothing advertisements, there was no significant improvement in the mean scores for knowledge and attitude after the post campaign. This could be due to the subject of child helmet and conspicuous clothing relatively new to the motorcyclists. With more extensive exposure and with the implementation of other types of intervention, it is hoped that the knowledge and attitude levels on child helmet and conspicuous clothing can be improved. The results on the practice clearly shows that campaigns alone are not effective in changing practice thus it need to be complemented with other road safety interventions such as concurrent enforcement.