Deliverable D 1.3 RESULTS OF META-ANALYSIS ... - cast-eu.org

Campaigns and awareness raising strategies in traffic safety — Deliverable D 1.3EXECUTIVE SUMMARYThere is a large body of research on the effect of road safety campaigns availablethat potentially allows formulating best practices for designing and evaluatingcampaigns. There is an urgent need for research focussing on the effects of roadsafety campaigns on the number of road traffic accidents and other key variablesasaccom panying measures like enforcement. This could be achieved by estimatingthe relative effects of contributing measures as for example the use of informationmediated by television, radio, newspapers, different forms of education, policeenforcement, etc.The EU-project CAST – Campaign Awareness raising Strategies in Traffic Safety -is in the form of a Specific Targeted Research Project aimed at meeting theEuropean Commission’s needs for improving road traffic safety by means of effectiveroad safety campaigns.The project was launched in February 2006 and will be completed January 2009.The consortium comprises 19 partners from 15 European countries and is lead byInsitut Belge pour la Sécurité Routière asbl (IBSR) located In Bruxelles. The presentreport is CAST deliverable D1.3 – one of two deliverables from Work Package 1.Defining ‘campaigns’Defining road safety campaigns is, however, not a straighy-forward task, ascampaigns may comprise a wide range of variables, as media-activities,accompanying measures, target groups, scales, etc. In the present context, acampaign is defined as follows:“Purposive attempts to inform, persuade, and motivate behaviour changes in arelatively well-defined and larger audience in order to improve road safety,typically within a given time period, by means of organized communicationactivities involving specific media channels often complemented by interpersonalsupport and/or other supportive activities as enforcement, education, legislation,commitment, rewards, etc.”Responses from 15 partner countries give an overview of current road safetycampaign traditions in each country, and an idea of the different themes andmeasures used. Past work attempting to determine whether campaigns work andwhat makes them work is summarized.Former basis of the CAST projectThe CAST project is heavily based on the EU-project GADGET completed in 1999and the succeeding project INFOEFFEKT completed in 2004. The results from theseprojects formed the basis with regard to methodology, analytic tools, and knowledgeof factors that contribute to the effects of campaigns. A brief description of the results5