Study of Psycho-Social Factors Affecting Traffic Accidents Among Young Boys in Tehran

Abstract

Background: It is believed that smoking is the gateway to use substances and illicit drugs. Due to an increase in smoking among students, we thought there is a need for more efficient ways to prevent smoking among the young and adolescents. Objectives: This study aimed to develop an extended version of the Health Belief Model (HBM) with elements of Health Literacy (HL) to assess whether an educational intervention could be effective in smoking prevention based on this new development in 2016. Methods: This was a quasi-experimental study performed on 130 students living in dormitories of Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences in Tehran, Iran, who were recruited and assigned to experimental and control groups (each containing 65 students). The experimental group received six electronic educational sessions via telegram application while the control group received no intervention. The data were collected using a questionnaire containing items on HBM, smoking preventive behaviors, and a measure of HL (the HL inventory for adults-HELIA). The questionnaire was completed at three time-points: before, immediately and three months after the intervention. Data analyses were done using analysis of variance, Friedman and Mann-Whitney U Tests. The significance level was set at 0.05. Results: Before the intervention, there was no significant difference in the demographic and background variables, the underlying level of knowledge, preventive behaviors, HL, and all the constructs of the model between the groups (P > 0.05). After the intervention, comparing two groups showed that the mean scores of knowledge, preventive behaviors, HL, and all components of the model changed significantly i n t he e xperimental g roup c ompared t o t he c ontrol g roup ( P < 0 . 0 5). T he mean a nd s tandard deviation of adoption of smoking preventive behaviors at the beginning of the study in smoking and non-smoking students in the

Differences in the Assessment of Safe and Risky Driving Behaviors: Pedestrians Versus Drivers

“…Finally, a key potential benefit of this study is highlighting road role-based issues as a potential source of concern for researchers, especially if the relevance of human factors and relationships on the road is considered a potential way to prevent crashes (Taylor et al, 2007), mainly through the development of a greater awareness on the origin and consequences of risky driving behaviors. If road users are aware of all these risky behaviors, it will be easier to reduce them, even though other factors such as infrastructures, vehicles, and social issues remain complementary and relevant for understanding traffic crash dynamics holistically (Javadi et al, 2015). Therefore, even though further research is still necessary (Hatakka et al, 2002), the actions that raise awareness on safety behaviors are directly linked to the amount of information on subjective risk perception of different road users (Eboli et al, 2017).…”

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“… 2 The unprecedented growth of traffic accidents in recent years has raised significant concerns for the identification and control of the leading causes in Iran. 3 …”