Citation

Case HW, Stewart RG. Highw. Res. Board bull. 1958; 172: 30-35.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1958, National Research Council (U.S.A.), Highway Research Board)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Driving attitudes often may become influential factors leading to the occurrence of traffic violations and accidents. However, a great proportion of reported work in this field consists of expert opinion, only two scales which purport to measure driving attitudes have been published and research does not indicate them to be wholly satisfactory. During the last five years, development of a driving attitude scale has been in progress in the institute of transportation and traffic engineering of the university of california. To obtain descriptions of real traffic situations for this scale, two clinical psychologists conducted informal interviews with 300 habitual traffic violators. During each interview, the violator described the manner in which he had received recent traffic citations and expressed himself freely regarding the actions of other drivers and police officers in those traffic situations. From the complete set of descriptions, the interviewers formulated 100 multiple-choice items to represent fairly typical traffic situations experienced by most drivers. Multiple-choice items, permitting more than a simple choice between accepting or rejecting a proposition contained in a complete sentence statement, presumably will (1) cover a wider range of attitude toward certain situations, permitting greater potential differentiation between criterion groups of drivers, and (2) make it more difficult for individuals to endorse the response which is believed to be more socially acceptable as a driving attitude. Fifty-five items of the original group are now undergoing preliminary validation. Test results have been obtained from a large number of university students, and the testing of traffic violators is proceeding slowly. For certain items, the results from the students show statistically significant differences between groups of individuals as classified in terms of traffic citations received while driving in california. Certain items also differentiate between groups of individuals as classified in terms of their reported highway driving speeds under different conditions. Other data tend to support these findings. For the significant items, comparisons of relative response frequencies indicate considerable agreement with some psychological expectations.