Newslink April marketing special

Towards your CPD
Evaluating road safety interventions:
when to step in, and how to gauge success
Janet
Stewart
London & the
South East
I had the chance to listen to a webinar hosted
by Tanya Fosdick at Agilysis recently, on how
and why we should evaluate road safety
interventions.
Among the speakers were Fay Cannon and
Dr Elizabeth Box; Elizabeth has been
instrumental in forming the Drive Fit
campaign, which was designed to address
the needs of 16-18 year-old pre-drivers.
The first question to address is why we
should evaluate interventions. The point, as
James Harrington said, is “What if we are
investing in solutions that don’t work?” What
we are doing must be effective, be value for
money and facilitate further improvement.
As driving instructors, we know this. One
size does not fit all. When it comes to
educational bodies, university research and
bodies such as the RAC and IAM, the
evaluation aims and objectives must meet
the further criteria of carrying stakeholder
confidence and being scalable.
There is no point in change that does not
lead to improvement. The aims and objectives
need to be clear. People can get so carried
away with detailed analysis and complex data
that the results almost get lost.
A couple of reports were mentioned during
this webinar – notably the 2004 Guidelines
for Evaluating Road Safety Education
Interventions and Dr Fiona Filan’s report of
2017 on Behavioural Change. There is also
Elizabeth Box’s paper on Empowering Young
Drivers with Road Safety Education. All of
these are well worth close reading.
There are three main problems with
research into what interventions work in the
area of road safety. Cost is the most obvious.
Then there is the time it takes to get projects
set up. Finally, there is human nature –
people start with enthusiasm, the process is
slow and people drop out of the research.
One of the questions asked was how to
decide when the drop out level is such that
the data won’t make sense. When do you
abandon it? How do you explain to the
stakeholders?
It is essential that there is a point to the
evaluation that is being undertaken. There
may be an area that a researcher is very
interested in but if it is only of very limited use
then maybe it should not be followed up.
Having planned an intervention, carried it
through and got the evaluation you may not
get the result that you were expecting; then
something needs to be changed.
The example given was skid-pan training
for young drivers. The premise was that they
would be safer if taught how to deal with
skidding. The outcome was that “skill fade”
set in quite quickly but the drivers were more
likely to speed having done the course.
On a non-driving subject, some juvenile
delinquents spent some time in an adult
prison to find out how harsh the environment
was. This was counter-intuitive – they came
out with the feeling that their risk-taking
behaviour was “normalised”.
I found it interesting that all three speakers
said that there is a real stigma attached to
publishing the results of interventions that
did not work, despite the fact that this would
be so useful to other research teams who
might have been planning something similar.
It was suggested that it would be helpful if
there was some standardisation of
evaluation and delivery methods. It was also
suggested that there should be a catalogue
of who was doing what research so that
there could be a pooling of ideas and an
avoidance of unnecessary duplication.
As to what we driving instructors do, of
course we evaluate all the time and put in
what we hope is the correct intervention. We
know that if something is not working then
we need to try a different approach rather
than just saying the same thing again but
louder.
I know I am not alone in having a tendency
to assume I understand why the learner has
done what they have done. I know, too, that I
can be very wide of the mark.
I was teaching bay parking at the local
leisure centre. My pupil’s eyes glazed over so
I tried to use a different form of words. She
then apologised and said she had been
looking at the legs of the firemen playing
football on the pitch the other side of the car,
out of my view!
There is so much information available, so
many papers, so much research and advice
out there for us, it is difficult to know where
to start.
However, each seminar, conference or
online event that I attend gives me some
nugget to take away and there is always
something more to think about and
incorporate into my teaching/tutoring/
coaching.
Janet Stewart is an Executive Member of the
IMTD.
Contact:
Janet Stewart,
MSA GB London & the South
janetslittlecar@btinternet.com
Tel 07989 852274.
36 NEWSLINK n APRIL 2024