Influence of Family Communication Patterns on Teen Risky Driving and Driving Intervention Effectiveness

Teen drivers are at heightened crash risk, largely due to lack of experience. Parents play a key role in influencing their teen’s behaviors and attitudes around driving safety. Parent-involved interventions have been shown to improve teen driving safety, but these interventions tend to be resource intensive and have limited scalability. This study aimed to determine the impact of family communication patterns on teen risky driving and on teen driving intervention effectiveness. Results showed that teen risky driving at baseline did not vary by family communication patterns. Findings also showed that the impact of a teen driving intervention was stronger among families with laissez-faire family communication style, which is characterized by little focus on child conformity and downplayed communication. These results provide a framework for targeting high-resource teen driving interventions (event recorder feedback and parent-communication training) to families with certain communication characteristics in order to attain the greatest risk reductions.

Supplemental Notes:
- This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ANB30 Standing Committee on Operator Education and Regulation.
Corporate Authors:
Transportation Research Board

,
Authors:
- Hamann, Cara
- Schwab-Reese, Laura
- O'Neal, Elizabeth
- Butcher, Brandon
- Peek-Asa, Corinne
Conference:
- Transportation Research Board 98th Annual Meeting
- Location: Washington DC, United States
- Date: 2019-1-13 to 2019-1-17
Date: 2019

Language

English

Media Info

Media Type: Digital/other
Features: References;
Pagination: 6p

Subject/Index Terms

TRT Terms: Attitudes; Behavior; Communication; Families; Parents; Risk taking; Teenage drivers; Traffic safety education
Subject Areas: Highways; Safety and Human Factors;

Filing Info

Accession Number: 01697701
Record Type: Publication
Report/Paper Numbers: 19-01432
Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
Created Date: Mar 1 2019 3:51PM