AN APPLICATION OF A CONDITIONAL LOGISTIC REGRESSION TO STUDY THE EFFECTS OF SAFETY BELTS, PRINCIPAL IMPACT POINTS, AND CAR WEIGHTS ON DRIVERS' FATALITIES

In addition to experimental trials in automotive factories, there is a fundamental need to monitor real people involved in real motor vehicle collisions to determine the impact of automotive design characteristics on injury mortality. To aid in designing future safety features for drivers' seats, data from the Fatal Accident Reporting System (FARS) were used to assess the effects of safety belts, directions of crash impacts, age, sex, and car weights on motor vehicle injury fatalities. Furthermore, because the FARS includes only accidents in which there was at least one fatality, this paper introduces a multivariate approach--a logistic regression conditioned on each accident--to avoid the sampling biases inherent in the FARS. The resulting model is used to quantify the relations among the safety belts, the directions of crash impacts, and vehicle weights and their effects on fatalities. Because the proposed approach allows researchers to study many important variables simultaneously and eliminates the biases resulting from many possible confounders, the estimates presented in this paper are considered to be more precise and more firmly established than earlier estimates. The new approach to analyzing the FARS data will also be useful for investigating the effects of other risk factors or automotive characteristics on crash fatalities.

• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/oclc/1800052
• Corporate Authors:

  Pergamon Press, Incorporated

  Maxwell House, Fairview Park
  Elmsford, NY  United States  10523
• Authors:
  • Lui, K-J
  • McGee, D
  • Rhodes, P
  • Pollock, D
• Publication Date: 1988

Media Info

• Features: References; Tables;
• Pagination: p. 197-203
• Serial:
  • Journal of Safety Research
  • Volume: 19
  • Issue Number: 4
  • Publisher: Elsevier
  • ISSN: 0022-4375
  • Serial URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00224375

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Age; Automobiles; Data analysis; Design; Drivers; Fatalities; Gender; Impact; Logistic regression analysis; Manual safety belts; Mathematical analysis; Multivariate analysis; Seats; Vehicle weight
• Identifier Terms: Fatal Accident Reporting System
• Uncontrolled Terms: Design features; Impact angle
• Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Design; Highways; Safety and Human Factors; Society; Vehicles and Equipment; I81: Accident Statistics; I91: Vehicle Design and Safety;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 00601368
• Record Type: Publication
• Source Agency: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
• Report/Paper Numbers: HS-040 674
• Files: HSL, TRIS, ATRI, USDOT
• Created Date: Nov 30 1990 12:00AM