Road traffic accidents are important health problems globally and each year approximately 1.3 million people lose their lives and 50 million people get severely injured on the world's roads as a result of these accidents (WHO,2015). In order to control road traffic accidents, a growing body of the literature investigates risks factors that could be broadly categorized as human, vehicle and environmental related factors (Shinar, 2007). However, while there are many studies that separately investigate these broad factors in relation to accident causation, there is little known about how these broad categories could interact with each other. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate how vehicle-related factors affect human-related factors. It is known that the capacity of a vehicle influences drivers' choices to make violations and/or errors in traffic, to behave aggressively during the drive. Therefore, more specifically, this study aims to investigate how the vehicle segment is related to driver behaviors and driver skills.
Background InformationIn this study, we tried to examine the relationship between vehicle segments and driver behavior and/or skills. The study was conducted with 183 drivers between the ages of 20 and 62. A web-based questionnaire containing demographic form questionnaire, the DBQ and the DSI were conducted to participants via e-mail and social media. Answers of the participants were downloaded from web-survey as SPSS file. The data has been clarified in accordance with its understandability. Commercial vehicles have been ignored and deleted. Correlation Analysis and ANOVA were conducted to see the relationship. The results from correlation analysis showed that only Perceptual Motor Skills and Vehicle Segments were correlated with each other. Further analysis, ANOVA also showed that there is a statistically significant difference between Perceptual Motor Skills and Vehicle Segments. Other variables, which are age, number of crashes, errors, lapses, aggressive violation, positive behavior, safety skills, did not show any significant effect. Relationship between vehicle segments and driver behavior and/or skills was studied for the first time in literature. The reason we did not get more significant results is that there are very few participants in certain segments. Future studies should be conducted with more participants for each segment. Original contribution of this study is being the first study that examines the relationship between vehicle segments and driver behavior and/or skills.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.