GRAND RAPIDS EFFECTS REVISITED: ACCIDENTS, ALCOHOL AND RISK

Abstract

The German Roadside Survey was conducted in the northern part of Bavaria (Unterfranken, part of the former West Germany), which has approximately 3 million inhabitants. Three components were done from the end of 1992 to the spring of 1994. Drivers were stopped and selected by the police who followed a random sampling plan. At a separate checkpoint, these drivers were interviewed and asked to supply a breath sample. Of those asked for a breath sample, 9128 (94.8%) agreed. The roadside survey oversampled weekends at night to obtain a large proportion of DUI drivers. For a representative picture of the DUI prevalence in Germany, the observations were adjusted using information from a representative study of driving in Germany (KONTIV; see Emnid, 1991). The Accident Study was also conducted in Unterfranken. We equipped a selected sample of police cars with breath testing devices, under the condition that officers try to obtain breath samples from all accident drivers, whether or not they were suspected of DUI. In 1993 in Unterfranken, data were obtained from 1.968 drivers who were responsible for causing an accident. The Roadside Survey and the Accident Study differed very much with regard to time of day (night: 20 p.m. to 4 a.m.; day: 4 a.m. to 20 p.m.) and day of week (weekend: Friday night to Monday morning; workday: Monday morning to Friday evening). These differences are reflective of such risk factors as, for example, the higher accident risk during the night. As we were mainly interested in alcohol-related accident risk, we controlled for these variables by applying a second weighting procedure to the data from the Roadside Survey. This two-dimensional weighting (by time of day and day of week) produced identical subject distributions in the two studies with respect to the combination of those two factors.