Social-cognitive correlates of risky adolescent cycling behavior

Abstract

BackgroundBicycle use entails high safety and health risks especially for adolescents. Most safety education programs aimed at adolescents focus on accident statistics and risk perceptions. This paper proposes the investigation of the social-cognitive correlates of risky cycling behaviors of adolescents prior to developing safety education programs.MethodSecondary school students aged 13 to 18 years (n = 1446) filled out questionnaires regarding bicycle behavior, risky intentions, accident experience, and social-cognitive determinants as suggested by the theory of planned behavior.ResultsRegression analysis revealed that the proximal variables (i.e., self-efficacy, attitudes towards drunk driving, personal norm regarding safekeeping of self and others, and compared risk) were able to predict 17% of the variance of risky behavior and 23% of the variance of risky intentions. The full model explained respectively 29% and 37% of the variance in risky behavior and risky intentions. Adolescents with positive attitudes towards risky behavior and low sense of responsibility report risky behavior, even when having been (close to) an accident.ConclusionsAdolescents realize whether they are risk takers or not. This implies that the focus of education programs should not be on risk perceptions, but on decreasing positive attitudes towards alcohol in traffic and increasing sense of responsibility instead. Cognitions regarding near accidents should be studied, the role of safe cycling self-efficacy is unclear.

Infrastructural and Human Factors Affecting Safety Outcomes of Cyclists

“…Regarding our first objective, it is worth mentioning that the observed directionality of associations between human factors and infrastructure variables, resulted consistently with other studies previously performed with samples of cyclists [4,32] and diverse groups of road users, especially drivers with high exposure to diverse road risks [33,34]. Specifically, it is worth remarking on the associations reported between age of cyclists and road crash rates in the last 5 years which were in accordance with other empirical sources [35,36], i.e., cyclists with less age tend to accumulate higher crash rates (regardless of severity) when riding compared with those with a higher age/riding experience.…”

Risky riding: Naturalistic methods comparing safety behavior from conventional bicycle riders and electric bike riders

“…Many cyclists did not attend, and there was no observed effect from the meetings on either the number of accidents or near-accidents (Bacchieri et al, 2010). Furthermore, a study of adolescents, age 13-18, in the Netherlands shows that not only do they often violate traffic rules while cycling, many of them are aware that they are conducting risky cycling behavior (Feenstra et al, 2010).…”

Measuring risky adolescent cycling behaviour

“…Self-reported risky cycling behaviours were assessed with the ACBQ (Feenstra, Ruiter, & Kok, 2010;Twisk et al, 2007), which consists of 22 items. Participants were asked how often they performed different kinds of dangerous cycling behaviour in the past month.…”