In an effort to decrease the frequency of alcohol-impaired driving, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) has established Victim Impact Panels (VIPs) in over 200 communities nationwide. The format of the panels is that victims of DWI crashes tell their stories and detail the consequences of DWI crashes, the audience for these panels being first-time DWI offenders. The accounts given in these panels are often vivid and very emotional, and the audience members often report being strongly affected by the experience. However, no controlled and systematic evaluations of the impact of these panels has been accomplished to date. Proposed here is a 5 year project that would comprehensively evaluate the impacts of the VIP sessions, using randomized field trials in two communities: Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Gallup, New Mexico, McKinley county seat. It is important to determine, as a health services research issue, whether an intervention such as the VIP sessions would aid in deterring DWI morbidity and mortality. The project, because of the locale having among the highest alcohol-related morbidity and mortality rates in the nation, is ideally suited to pursue the questions the project poses. The design for both trials will be a 2 group randomized design, with one group receiving a DWI school intervention only, and the other group receiving both DWI school and the VIP sessions as well. Participants will be followed over a two year time period during which intervention-related data will be collected, and DWI recidivism data will be collected from the local courts' DWI record database. The first randomized field trial will be implemented in Albuquerque, and the second in McKinley county. The proposed project will definitively determine the preventive impact of the VIP intervention, which has strong theoretical characteristics, is widely disseminated, and is very cost effective. As such, the project represents a significant contribution to health services research.
| Polacsek, M; Rogers, E M; Woodall, W G et al. (2001) MADD victim impact panels and stages-of-change in drunk-driving prevention. J Stud Alcohol 62:344-50 |
