Motor vehicle injury is by far the leading cause of death and serious injury for children and adolescents; for teen-age drivers, alcohol is the single most important factor. Drivers age 16-24 have the highest alcohol involvement rates in fatal crashes, whether based on miles driven, number of licensed drivers, or population, and young female drivers are the fastest growing group of drinking drivers. The broad, long-term objective of this study is to clarify the relationships between early psychosocial characteristics and subsequent high risk behavior in adolescents, including alcohol-related driving, in order to enable the design of early interventions aimed at modifying the antecedents of the high risk behavior. Young female drivers will be of particular interest.
The aims of this project are to: (1) Collect data on driving licensure and driving infractions, including crash-related data, on two large samples for which existing longitudinal data on psychosocial and alcohol use/misuse variables have been and are being collected; (2) Merge the driving and crash-related data to be collected with the available and prospective data; (3) Conduct multivariate analyses to develop and cross validate models of psychosocial predictors of high risk driving behavior, (4) Conduct analyses to determine extent to which alcohol misuse prevention programs influence subsequent adolescent driving behaviors; (5) Identify special target populations for development of prevention programs on the basis of the models developed in Specific Aim #3 and findings from Aim #4; (6) Identify implications for future prevention programs, especially school-based programs and alcohol education programs for youthful convicted drunken drivers. Subjects will include 5000 or more young people who will become eligible for driver licensure during the project period and for whom measures of psychosocial variables are available, including measures of 1) alcohol use and misuse; 2) age of onset of unsupervised drinking; 3) exposure to peer use and misuse of alcohol; 4) susceptibility to peer pressure; 5) parental alcohol use and misuse; 6) parental norms regarding adolescent alcohol use and misuse; 7) sibling alcohol use and misuse; 8) deviant self image; 9) internal health locus of control; and 10) self esteem. No previous study has specifically linked such measures to subsequent driving behaviors. The results will be useful for developing and testing preventive school-based programs. As additional student cohorts become old enough for licensure, the models developed will be further tested and validated using these new populations. The data available from the current longitudinal studies provide an unprecedented opportunity to relate measures of psychosocial development to subsequent health risk behaviors in an area representing the major threat to the health and safety of young people. To the extent that alcohol misuse prevention programs can be shown to affect driving behaviors, the effects should be reflected in reduced death and injury to this vulnerable population.
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