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Abstract
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17th World Congress of International Association of Accident and Traffic Medicine
Introduction: A recent study has reported on changes in drink driving behaviours by senior high school student cohorts over a decade. There has also been a number of studies following up high school students over short time spans to evaluate the effectiveness of educational interventions. There have been no reported panel studies examining the consistency of these behaviours over an extended period of time.
METHODS: The present paper reports on the findings of a large population study in which junior high school students were surveyed in 1988 on their drink driving behaviours. Ten years later in 1998 their traffic records were examined to determine the extent to which their self reported behaviours at pre-licensing were predictive of later adult driving offences.
RESULTS: The study involved matching 3731 students who were surveyed in their tenth year at school (average age 14.5 years) with their traffic offences recorded over the ten year period. At the initial contact students were asked to indicate whether they had ever engaged in a number of drink driving behaviours including drink driving a car, a motor cycle or another motor vehicle and riding a bicycle after drinking. Traffic records for drink driving and related offences were systematically monitored for the cohort through Transport Department records. Highly significant and meaningful predictions of later offences could be made on the basis of the earlier reported behaviours. The minority of students (29.5%) who reported such behaviours at junior school was disproportionately involved in associated offences over the ten-year data collection period (54.6%). The association was present in both males and females and was consistent across the types of vehicles driving or ridden at the earlier age. The paper argues that these findings indicate a very high level of stability in such behaviours over a period of considerable change in social attitudes and that this stability has important implications for the targeting of prevention programs.
Language: en |