Citation

Schmidt CW, Shaffer JW, Zlotowitz HI, Fisher RS. Proc. Am. Assoc. Automot. Med. Annu. Conf. 1976; 20: 307-314.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1976, Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

During the course of a seven year inter-disciplinary, multi- institutional investigation we have intensively studied 310 drivers involved in both fatal and non-fatal crashes. A wide range of data pertaining to driving conditions, vehicles, and persons was available, including collision (vehicle) performance and injury reports, police accident reports, Department of Motor Vehicle records, postmortem and toxicological assessments by the State Medical Examiner's Office and Psychiatric-Psychological assessments involving narrative summaries of interviews with friends, relatives, and associates of the crash victims. The sample was collected from the period August 1968 to July 1975; the geographic area covered was the City of Baltimore and its surrounding metropolitan area. The data collected from this study was subjected to univariate, multivariate and factoral analyses.

The principal findings of this report were: The drivers in the study were significantly deviant from population norms with regard to a number of personality characteristics, as measured by the Katz Adjustment Scale R-Form. The drivers, as a group, could be described as aggressive, impulsive and displaying moderately anti- social characteristics. Surprisingly, these deviant psychological characteristics did not correlate with socio-demographic variables, such as age, positive blood alcohol levels, culpability for the crash, number of vehicles involved in the crash, or death of the driver. Our interpretation of these findings are: The studied drivers are not representative of the general, male driver populations. The drivers displayed personality characteristics which are habitual, lifelong, and essentially preclude their (the drivers') ability to collaborate in safety action programs, educational efforts for safer driving, or consistent use of active restraining devices.