BEHAVIORAL-CHARACTERISTICS AND INVOLVEMENT IN DIFFERENT TYPES OF TRAFFIC ACCIDENT

Recent research has shown risk of road traffic accident involvement to be associated with the tendency to commit driving violations, fast dr iving, and a lack of thoroughness in decision making. It has also been shown that three broad types of accident can be used to categorise mo re than 70% of drivers' brief written descriptions of their accidents. These categories are ''shunts'' (rear-end collisions), right-of-way v iolations, and loss-of-control accidents. Furthermore, for each accide nt type the role of the reporting driver may be defined as active (str iking) or passive (struck) depending on the position of his/her vehicl e. This paper reports two studies examining the extent to which measur es of tendency to commit violations (measured by the Driver Behaviour Questionnaire (DBQ)), frequency of fast driving (measured by the Drivi ng Style Questionnaire (DSQ)) and thoroughness in decision making (mea sured by the Decision Making Questionnaire (DMQ)) are associated speci fically with involvement in each of the main accident types. The resul ts showed that a high DBQ-violation score was associated with accident s in general, both active and passive, and specifically with active lo ss-of-control accidents and passive right-of-way accidents. High DSQ-s peed and low DMQ-thoroughness were associated with active but not pass ive accidents, high DSQ-speed with active right-of-way violations, and low DMQ-thoroughness was specifically associated with active shunts a nd active right-of-way violations. The implications of these results a re discussed.