Attitudes, perceptions, fatalism and behaviours: some early findings

摘要

Road transport represents the 12th leading cause of death in the UK, and things are not improving. This research focuses on one of the factors behind the statistics; human behaviour. Specifically, the aim of this study was to investigate the relationships between self-reported involvement in accidents on the road, self-reported pedestrian behaviours, and three social cognitive constructs; road safety attitudes, on-road risk perceptions, and fatalistic beliefs. In a survey of 695 respondents, it was found that attitudes relate strongly to self-reported behaviours, and to some of the constructs measured by the fatalistic beliefs scale used here. Risk perceptions were not found to correlate strongly with any other variable, and splitting the sample by self-reported involvement in accidents resulted in few group differences. Results are discussed in terms of the need for road safety interventions to consider the determinants of behaviour.