Promoting transportation safety in adolescence: the drivingly randomized controlled trial.

BACKGROUND: The impact of young drivers' motor vehicle crashes (MVC) is substantial, with young drivers constituting only 14% of the US population, but contributing to 30% of all fatal and nonfatal injuries due to MVCs and 35% ($25 billion) of the all medical and lost productivity costs. The current best-practice policy approach, Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL) programs, are effective primarily by delaying licensure and restricting crash opportunity. There is a critical need for interventions that target families to complement GDL. Consequently, we will determine if a comprehensive parent-teen intervention, the Drivingly Program, reduces teens' risk for a police-reported MVC in the first 12 months of licensure. Drivingly is based on strong preliminary data and targets multiple risk and protective factors by delivering intervention content to teens, and their parents, at the learner and early independent licensing phases. METHODS: Eligible participants are aged 16-17.33 years of age, have a learner's permit in Pennsylvania, have practiced no more than 10 h, and have at least one parent/caregiver supervising. Participants are recruited from the general community and through the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia's Recruitment Enhancement Core. Teen-parent dyads are randomized 1:1 to Drivingly or usual practice control group. Drivingly participants receive access to an online curriculum which has 16 lessons for parents and 13 for teens and an online logbook; website usage is tracked. Parents receive two, brief, psychoeducational sessions with a trained health coach and teens receive an on-road driving intervention and feedback session after 4.5 months in the study and access to DriverZed, the AAA Foundation's online hazard training program. Teens complete surveys at baseline, 3 months post-baseline, at licensure, 3months post-licensure, 6 months post-licensure, and 12 months post-licensure. Parents complete surveys at baseline, 3 months post-baseline, and at teen licensure. The primary end-point is police-reported MVCs within the first 12 months of licensure; crash data are provided by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. DISCUSSION: Most evaluations of teen driver safety programs have significant methodological limitations including lack of random assignment, insufficient statistical power, and reliance on self-reported MVCs instead of police reports. Results will identify pragmatic and sustainable solutions for MVC prevention in adolescence. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov # NCT03639753.

Prevalence of teen driver errors leading to serious motor vehicle crashes.

OBJECTIVES: Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of adolescent deaths. Programs and policies should target the most common and modifiable reasons for crashes. We estimated the frequency of critical reasons for crashes involving teen drivers, and examined in more depth specific teen driver errors. METHODS: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA) National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey collected data at the scene of a nationally representative sample of 5470 serious crashes between 7/05 and 12/07. NHTSA researchers assigned a single driver, vehicle, or environmental factor as the critical reason for the event immediately leading to each crash. We analyzed crashes involving 15-18 year old drivers. RESULTS: 822 teen drivers were involved in 795 serious crashes, representing 335,667 teens in 325,291 crashes. Driver error was by far the most common reason for crashes (95.6%), as opposed to vehicle or environmental factors. Among crashes with a driver error, a teen made the error 79.3% of the time (75.8% of all teen-involved crashes). Recognition errors (e.g., inadequate surveillance, distraction) accounted for 46.3% of all teen errors, followed by decision errors (e.g., following too closely, too fast for conditions) (40.1%) and performance errors (e.g., loss of control) (8.0%). Inadequate surveillance, driving too fast for conditions, and distracted driving together accounted for almost half of all crashes. Aggressive driving behavior, drowsy driving, and physical impairments were less commonly cited as critical reasons. Males and females had similar proportions of broadly classified errors, although females were specifically more likely to make inadequate surveillance errors. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings support prioritization of interventions targeting driver distraction and surveillance and hazard awareness training.

Adolescent drivers' perceptions of the advantages and disadvantages of abstention from in-vehicle cell phone use.

Driver in-vehicle cell phone use presents a dangerous distraction for adolescent drivers for whom motor vehicle crashes represents the leading cause of death. We used the National Young Driver Survey (NYDS), a nationally representative (N=5665) cross-sectional study of adolescent driving behavior, to examine potential psychosocial correlates of cell phone use while driving (CPWD). Results indicated that stronger beliefs about the advantages of abstention from CPWD were associated with less frequent CPWD, adjusted OR: 0.46 95% [CI: 0.40-0.53]), while stronger beliefs about the disadvantages of abstention were associated with more frequent CPWD, adjusted OR: 1.41 95% CI: [1.21-1.64]. In the absence of strong advantage beliefs, disadvantage beliefs did not have a meaningful association with less frequent CPWD. Almost 30% of adolescents held weaker advantage beliefs coupled with stronger disadvantage beliefs, placing them most at risk. These findings offer guidance for a wide range of intervention and health promotion efforts.

Gender differences in relations of mental rotation, verbal fluency, and SAT scores to finger length ratios as hormonal indexes.

One hundred thirty-four university students (93 women, 41 men) were administered the Vandenberg Mental Rotation Test and the Thurstone Word Fluency Test, and they were asked to report their Scholastic Achievement Test scores. Finger lengths were measured, because literature has reported gender differences in the ratio of the 2nd to 4th, 2nd to 3rd, and 2nd to 5th finger lengths, such that the ratio is larger in women than in men. The goal of this study was to evaluate the relations between finger-length ratios and cognitive skills, such as spatial skills and verbal fluency, which have shown gender differences and direct relations to hormonal effects. Gender differences were found in the expected directions, such that the men performed better than the women for mental rotation, the women performed better than the men for verbal fluency, and the finger-length ratios were in the directions reported in the literature. The finger-length ratios showed an interesting relation with the cognitive variables for the men and women. For the men, better performance on the measures, including mental rotation, verbal fluency, and verbal Scholastic Achievement Test score was associated with less of a male-typical finger-length ratio pattern, or higher ratios. For the women, better performance for mental rotation and verbal fluency was associated with less of a female-typical finger-length ratio pattern, or lower ratios. Thus, in this group of college students, better cognitive performance was associated with a less gender-typical finger-length ratio, for both men and women. These findings are discussed in the context of other similar reports and a possible curvilinear relation between hormones and cognition in normal populations.