Seat Belt Incentive Programs: An Extension to Three North Carolina High Schools

摘要

The report describes seat belt incentive programs with three North Carolina high schools and thus represents an extension of earlier incentive activity by the Highway Safety Research Center (HSRC). A similar method was utilized in all of the efforts, whereby participants first received educational information concerning the need to wear seat belts, followed by the awarding of prizes to occupants correctly buckled up whose vehicles were randomly selected from the traffic stream. All of these projects were quite successful in achieving follow-up seat belt use rates far in excess of baseline rates. At Chapel Hill High School, the baseline belt use rate (driver shoulder belt only) was 20 percent. During the incentive phase, the overall rate increased to 53 percent. After the prize-giving had ended, an overall rate of 36 percent was achieved. In other words, there was only a modest decrease in the belt use rate that was attained during the incentive phase. The community campaign, entitled Seat Belts Pay Off, is notable in that follow-up use rates above 40 percent were maintained some two years after the onset of the program.