Knowledge and practices about road safety measures among college going students in an urban area of Chennai in 2019: Cross-sectional descriptive study

Abstract

Introduction: Road traffic injuries have emerged as one of the major global public health challenges. The current study was done with an objective to assess the knowledge and practices about road safety measures among college going students in Chennai and to study the association between road safety practices and the gender of the study participants. Methods: A cross-sectional descriptive study for a period of 6 months was conducted between April-October 2019 in a college offering graduation courses in Chennai. Multi-stage random sampling method was employed and based on the findings of an earlier study the sample size was estimated as 170. A semi-structured questionnaire was developed, piloted and validated and then used to interview the study participants about different study variables. Ethical clearance was obtained from the Institutional Ethics Committee, data entry was done in Microsoft Excel and statistical analysis was done using SPSS version 23.0. Frequency distributions was calculated for all the variables. Chi square test was used for testing the significance of association between road safety practices and gender at p-value of 0.05. Results: The mean age of the study participants was 21 ± 1.2 years and that the majority 64 (37.6%) of the participants were from the 18-20 years. It was found that 33 (19.4%) of the study participants had a history of road traffic injury in the last year. Almost 164 (97%), 157 (92.4%) and 141 (85%) of the students were correctly aware about the legal age for driving, use of safety measures and about the traffic signals respectively. A total of 84 (53.2%) of the students were not adhering to speed limits, while 127 (74.7%) were either encouraging or participating in riding with more than recommended persons on 2 wheelers. Conclusion: In conclusion, the average knowledge about road safety measures among the college students was estimated as 61.4%. However, the practices pertaining to adherence to the speed limits, use of Zebra crossing, utilization of personal protective equipment, and use of mobile phones while driving were found to be quite poor. Further, a statistically significant relationship was observed between the practice of adherence to traffic signals and the distribution of respondents based on their gender.