Factors Influencing Young Drivers’ Willingness to Engage in Risky Driving Behavior: Continuous Lane-Changing

Xiaoxiao Wang,Liangjie Xu

doi:10.3390/su13116459

Abstract

Young adults have a tendency to drive unsafely and put themselves at a high level of risk. Continuous lane-changing is one such kind of risky behavior. This study aimed to investigate the factors that influence young drivers based on an integrated model of the prototype willingness model (PWM) and the theory of planned behavior (TPB). The validity of the model was evaluated by data collected from 481 young drivers through an online questionnaire. The structural equation model was used to test the proposed model, and the findings indicated that young drivers’ willingness to engage in continuous lane-changing was influenced by attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, perceived risk, prototype similarity, and prototype favorability. The integrated model of PWM-TPB accounted for 58.3% of the variance in young drivers’ willingness, and the findings possess implications for designing effective interventions.

Highlights

Every year, road traffic accidents claim about 1.35 million lives worldwide, cause20–50 million to be injured, and have become the number-one killer of young people [1]
We focused on a different risky driving behavior among young drivers: continuous lane-changing
Preece et al [49] examined the factors influencing young drivers’ willingness to speed and text while driving based on the prototype willingness model (PWM), and the results showed that attitudes and prototype perception were significant predictors

Summary

Introduction

Road traffic accidents claim about 1.35 million lives worldwide, cause20–50 million to be injured, and have become the number-one killer of young people [1]. Young drivers have been receiving great attention from many researchers due to their risky driving such as speeding [4,5,6,7], driving while drowsy [8], texting while driving [9,10,11,12], drunk driving [13,14], smartphone use while driving [15], not wearing a seat belt [16], and so on. Researchers [17,18,19,20,21] have developed a series of Young Drivers Scale (YDS) to measure risky driving behavior in different countries. We focused on a different risky driving behavior among young drivers: continuous lane-changing

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion