A university-based incentive program: motivating large-scale safety belt use through indigeneous personnel

Recent research has demonstrated beneficial impact of incentives for safety belt promotion in a variety of environmental settings and has prompted the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to promote and support community wide incentive programs for motivating safety belt use nationwide. Although influencing remarkable increases in safety belt use, these community efforts have definite weaknesses, including excessive costs, short-term intervention periods, limited evaluation data, and program delivery by outside agencies rather than indigenous personnel. This study reports the plan and outcome of a large-scale, safety belt program which overcame these disadvantages. The year-long ''Seatbelt Sweepstakes" began Fall 1983 in a large university community (21,000 students) and was delivered by the campus police. The 15 regular police officers recorded the license numbers of vehicles with drivers wearing a shoulder belt, and each Monday of quarterly intervention periods, ten raffle winners were drawn from these numbers. Winners received gift certificates donated by community merchants. A comprehensive evaluation scheme includes daily observations of shoulder belt use, periodic attitude surveys of program agents (police) and recipients (students), and continuous recording of program side-effects (e.g., number of parking tickets and speeding violations, safety belt use and injuries at accident scenes). For those drivers affiliated with the university (i.e., faculty, staff, and students) usage increased from a Fall baseline mean of 17% to 26% during the second incentive period, while usage for non-affiliated drivers increased to a lesser extent, from a pre-program mean of 16% to an incentive program mean of 1990. Winter withdrawal usage rates were 25% and 17%, respectively, suggesting that the program had a differential effect on university affiliated vs. non-university affiliated drivers. Faculty and staff had a higher Fall baseline usage percentage than students (19% vs. 15% mean usage for faculty/staff and students, respectively), increased their belt wearing as a result of the the intervention phases to a greater extent than students (33% vs. 20% mean usage for faculty/staff and students, respectively), and showed greater maintenance after the incentives were withdrawn in the Winter (30% vs. 22% mean usage for faculty/staff and students, respectively). A systematic evaluation of student opinions suggest that opinions toward campus police did not change significantly as a function of the Seatbelt Sweepstakes although an officer post program questionnaire indicated that the officers felt the students were responding in a more positive manner toward them specifically as a result of Sweepstakes 1 and 2. In addition to attitudinal measures, a cost effective analysis indicated that Sweepstakes 1 and 2 were relatively inexpensive to run and the implementation of the program interfered only slightly with officers' ongoing duties.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Psychology

Department dc:contributor.department

Psychology

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Year dc:date.issued

1983

Author dc:creator

• Rudd, James Robert

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10919/113499

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/113499