A STUDY OF SEAT BELT EFFECTIVENESS BASED ON A METHODOLOGY FOR ANALYZING GENERAL CATEGORICAL DATA WITH MISCLASSIFICATION ERRORS

Most studies examining the effectiveness of seat belts in reducing injury due to automobile accidents have been based on police level data. Due to the circumstances surrounding the officer's investigation of the crash, such data generally contain misclassification errors relating to belt usage and injury sustained, which can seriously bias any effectiveness estimates derived from that data. In this paper, methodology for analyzing general categorical data with misclassification errors is described and the procedure applied to the seat belt effectiveness question. The technique utilizes an original large sample based on police-reported accidents together with a relatively small supplementary sample which is cross-classified by the police and by a more reliable classification mechanism. The procedure is illustrated using police-reported North Carolina accidents for the first eight months of 1975 as the "original sample. The true classification of the supplementary sample of accidents is assumed to be obtained through hospital reports for injured occupants and through telephone interviews for the non-injured. Comparisons are then made of the belt-associated relative risks thus obtained. /Author/

• Supplemental Notes:
  • Presented at 6th International Technical Conference on Experimental Safety Vehicles, Washington, D.C., October 12-15, 1976.
• Corporate Authors:

  University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

  Highway Safety Research Center
  Chapel Hill, NC  United States  27599
• Authors:
  • Hochberg, Y
• Publication Date: 1976-10

Media Info

• Features: References; Tables;
• Pagination: 17 p.

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Crash investigation; Data analysis; Injuries; Manual safety belts; Mathematical analysis; Measures of effectiveness; Police; Traffic crashes
• Uncontrolled Terms: Effectiveness; Motor vehicle accidents
• Subject Areas: Highways; Safety and Human Factors; Security and Emergencies;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 00178726
• Record Type: Publication
• Source Agency: National Safety Council Safety Research Info Serv
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Jul 29 1978 12:00AM