Objective: In the aftermath of a child injury, children and parents can jointly experience acute stress symptoms. Optimism and self-efficacy might buffer against posttraumatic stress disorder. Knowing that children are innately receptive to parent modelling, we were interested in exploring how parent acute stress, optimism and self-efficacy might transpire in parent-child interactions and whether any differences existed between mothers and fathers. Methods: We recruited 71 families of seriously injured children who were hospitalized for at least 24 hours. Parents completed self-report measures of acute stress, optimism and selfefficacy. Children wore the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR; Mehl, 2017) for a twoday period post-discharge. The EAR recorded ambient sounds for 30 seconds every 5 minutes. The audio recordings were transcribed and coded. We derived a percentage of time spent with each parent (interaction time), and average ratings of the emotional tone of voice for each speaker. Results: Overall, parental acute stress and self-efficacy were not associated with interaction time or emotional tone, and parents generally spent less time with older children. Compared to fathers, mothers spent significantly more time with their child, particularly for daughters, but mothers did not differ from fathers in emotional tone, acute stress, optimism or selfefficacy. For mothers, optimism may be associated with greater interaction time and more positive emotional tone. Conclusions: The present study highlighted parent gender differences in time spent with children and enabled the inclusion of more fathers using a naturalistic observational tool.
This study used the bus incident data in Victoria, Australia to establish the relationship between operational characteristics and the safety performance of bus operators. A series of count models were investigated to account for methodological challenges, including excess zeros and panel data structure. The empirical results highlighted the different effects operational characteristics had on the risk and prevalence of bus incidents. Operators of smaller size, providing non-route services and operating in regional areas had a lower risk of having any reported incidents compared with larger route operators and operators in areas of higher accessibility. In cases where at least one incident had been reported, incident frequency was higher for operators with higher fleet total travel distance, older fleets and better roadworthy performance (this factor being counterintuitive). Findings from this study provide safety regulators with evidence-driven opportunities to enhance bus safety, including improving incident reporting practices, the establishment of a comprehensive database for heavy vehicle operators, and specific efforts targeted at older fleets.
This paper examines the effects of vehicular and operational characteristics on bus roadworthiness. The analysis was based on annual bus inspection data in Victoria, Australia, between 2014 and 2017, consisting of 17,630 inspections of 6,447 vehicles run by 252 operators. A multilevel modeling approach was employed to account for the hierarchical data structure where inspections are nested within vehicles and vehicles within operators. The results offered insights into the effects on bus roadworthiness of characteristics attributable to inspections, vehicles, and operators. The probability of failing an inspection was found to be positively associated with vehicle age and odometer reading. Vehicle make played an important role in roadworthiness outcome, with the performance of different makes varying significantly. Small operators carried the highest risk of failure and large operators the lowest, irrespective of the location of operation. The multilevel analysis revealed that 28.9% of the variation in inspection outcomes occurred across operators and 5.2% across vehicles, which verified the presence of the hierarchical structure. The findings from this study provide safety regulators with solid research evidence to formulate policies aimed at enhancing bus roadworthiness.
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