PERSONALITY STRUCTURE OF ELDERLY DRIVERS

This paper reports the factor structure of a 37-item personality quest ionnaire intended to be predictive of driving performance in elderly p ersons. Subjects were 191 persons 63 years of age or older, about half of whom also were given perceptual/cognitive tasks and drove on a clo sed driving course. Although the personality questionnaire did not pre dict driving skill, the factor structure of the questionnaire is of in terest. Of several factor analyses, the most satisfactory was a 2-fact or solution. We interpreted the approximately orthogonal factors as me asuring what we labeled Competence and Emotionality.