Preparing a survey of young novice drivers, we are still looking for an appropriate wording of a question regarding the so-called „near misses“. If you know of an attempt to ask such events successfully in a survey, I’d be grateful for any tips regarding literature or formulation proposals.
You may find some useful practical wording in the Cohort II questionnaire and report from TRL, looking at new drivers in GB "Cohort II: A Study of Learner and New Drivers. Vol. 2 – Questionnaires and Data Tables.
Wells, P., Tong, S., Sexton, B., Grayson, G., and Jones, E. (2008)
Road Safety Research Report No. 81. London: Department for Transport.
Includes copies of the driver questionnaires used by TRL for the report, ‘Cohort II: A study of learner and new drivers. Vol. 1.’ By Wells et al (2008). "
http://www.roadsafetyevaluation.com/evaluationguides/other-published-reports.html
@Walter. I completely agree. I always had some regrets anyway and perhaps we should consider taking it up again in a future project.
For an online questionnaire of motorcycle riders we asked "How many near misses or close calls have you had in the last 12 months while riding on a public road?" and then asked them to describe the most serious one from the last 12 months and provided a text box. Respondents had no problem providing answers, but there was a wide range of numbers - which was okay because this was more of an exploratory aspect rather than the main game for this study.
To be more specific you could add "...near misses or close calls for which you had to brake or swerve unexpectedly". And if near misses are your main focus divide it up "...near misses...brake or swerve...involving a pedestrian" "...involving a car" etc.
Since they are novices you could also use something like "...that really shook you up" or some such. Depends what your hypothesis(es) are I guess.
If it is still interesting, you may get some ideas from a pilot study we made many years ago at a Swedish skid-pad. The purpose was to collect evidence of erroneous conclusions from studies of self- reported accidents and their alleged positive correlation to skid-pad training according to a Norwegian study. The conclusion lead to (unfortunate in my opinion) changes of the skid-pad training which is mandatory to get a Swedish (or a Norwegian?) driver's license.
In our pilot study the results pointed significantly (Chi-square) at a strong confounding effect. The number of remembered road accidents (as a vehicle occupant in the past) was greater for the group reporting after the training than for the group reporting before.
My report (in Swedish) has not been published but I may upload the PDF to Research Gate and perhaps submit a translation for peer-review to a suitable journal. Then I would be happy to refer to similar doubts on self-reported incidents, near-misses and (minor) accidents. I would be grateful for any references (@Luc?) and journal suggestions?
I guess it's a good thing that RG reminds us of things we once thought about before moving on...
'remembered accidents post skid pan greater than before'? I presume they were randomly allocated to pre/post recall groups. Do you think the training reminded them of past events?, sensitised them to memories and thus aided recall? A bit like a low level PTSD thing?
I wonder if there might have been a difference in something like insurance claims as a more objective measure? Or if you asked again say a week later "sorry, we seem to have lost some of the data - hard to get good help these days. could you please answer a couple of questions again? One was how many crashes had you had prior..."
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