A behavioural approach to improving traffic behaviour of young children

Abstract

Research evidence suggests that specific errors in a number of well-defined situations account for the majority of traffic accidents involving young children. The required road-crossing behaviour in those situations cannot be instilled through cognitive instruction, but needs to be trained in the traffic environment. A traffic education programme was developed that incorporated both road-crossing training to be carried out by parents and audio-visual demonstrations to be carried out by kindergarten teachers. This programme was used in an experiment in which one group of children was trained by their parents, one group was trained by experienced assistants and one group served as controls. The results of this experiment demonstrated that parents are capable of achieving improvements in the road-crossing behaviour of their children, and that these improvements were still demonstrable 4 months following the completion of the training programme. Only minor differences were found between the effects of parental training and the effects of training carried out by assistants. These results indicate that explicit training can improve the essential road-crossing behaviour of young children and that parents are capable of carrying out such training successfully.