Determinants and Stakeholders Influencing Children’s Road Safety Education

Abstract

Road safety education is, widely, the best base and the greatest assurance of the future in terms of road safety prevention and promotion. Nowadays, RSE constitutes one of the main growing concerns in terms of complimentary education in many countries, taking into account, among other factors, the high rates of accidents that affect the health and welfare of childhood and adolescence. Furthermore, it is a necessity for the community health to create, train, encourage and lead positives attitudes for good road safety education. The general objective of this study was to describe the factors and stakeholders that have influence on the learning of road safety education and safe behaviors of children as road users. The results are very interesting. For example, when to parents have been asked about road safety education of their children, factors such as the parents influence and school environment have been considered as positive factors or stakeholders that influence on the road safety education of the children. Regarding children’s opinion, most of the children consider that the drivers do not respect the rules never or sometimes, but only 5% of them believe that their parents do not respect the normative. However, a third part of the children reports signs of road aggression among their parents. Furthermore, 13% of the children do not feel safe when walks by their cities. This study shows the vital importance of the road safety education and key stakeholders, such as parents and the scholar system, to promote safe attitudes, behaviors and outcomes in terms of road safety. Also, the observed behaviors and circumstances related with road behavior of parents have an important influence on children’s road safety education, that is crucial issue that must be addressed from different perspectives, due to high accident rates registered by children, who are a key population group to direct interventions in this regard, aiming to increase the effectiveness of interventions for welfare and health improvement, based on the child education.