The purpose of this K23 Mentored Patient-Oriented Career Development Award is to enable Dr. Delgado to gain the experience and skills necessary to become an independent investigator focused on developing and testing novel, behavioral economic interventions for reducing injury causing behaviors in teens and young adults. Dr. Delgado's central hypothesis is that insights from the field of behavioral economics help explain why many behavioral injury prevention interventions are ineffective, and that leveraging these insights through mobile technology interventions can lead to more effective reductions in injury causing behaviors. This Award will provide four years of protected time for Dr. Delgado to acquire the skills necessary to secure independent funding as a translational injury prevention scientist through a training plan that includes mentored research, coursework, and guided independent study. Specifically, in the experimental study of cellphone use while driving Dr. Delgado will: (1) Learn to apply theories and mechanisms of behavior change for injury prevention in adolescents and young adults; (2) Develop skills for designing and refining mobile behavior change interventions for injury prevention; and (3) Develop skills for conducting randomized trials of behavioral economic interventions. Dr. Delgado and his experienced, cross-disciplinary team of mentors and advisors will test the potential for behavioral economics to enhance self-control related injury prevention interventions by focusing on the significant health risk behavior of texting while driving. Most of Dr. Delgado's training will be invested in mentored research, carrying out an innovative research plan in which he will: (1) Design and iteratively refine a theoretically guided behavioral economic intervention to reduce teen handheld cellphone use while driving; (2) Pilot a randomized trial to determine the feasibility and acceptability of implementing this behavioral economic intervention; and (3) Identify the measure of cellphone use while driving most associated with safety events for use in for an R01-level trial to determine effectiveness of the piloted intervention. This work is significant since nearly half of U.S. teens admit to texting while driving despite knowing that distracted driving is risky, leading to over 400,000 crashes per year. Educational campaigns, pledges, and legal bans have had limited impact on curbing this behavior. And given this, distracted driving from cellphone use has been identified as a top emerging cause of injury in need for future research in the US Healthy People 2020 objectives. This work is innovative as leveraging behavioral economics is a novel approach to reducing injury with the potential to be broadly applicable across many adolescent health risk behaviors and problems of self-control.
Nearly half of U.S. teens admit to texting while driving despite knowing that it is dangerous. Traditional interventions such as awareness campaigns and legal bans have not been effective in reducing texting while driving. This proposal seeks to reduce texting while driving in teens through the novel application of behavioral economic techniques that have been highly successful for other risk behaviors.
