Methods for assessing drivers' perception of specific hazards on the road

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to test a number of techniques for assessing drivers' perception of hazards. The techniques included three types of interview methods, the Q-sort method, and several variants of the repertory grid method. The techniques were judged largey on their ability to differentiate between old and young drivers, two groups with known differences in accident frequency. None of the interview techniques produced useful information regarding drivers' perception of hazards, and neither these techniques nor the Q-sort discriminated between old and young drivers. All the variants of the repertory grid differentiated between old and young drivers, in the sense that old drivers used extremes of the rating scale more often than young drivers. This phenomenon was most apparent with the fixed repertory grid. Further work on this technique revealed further differences between the age groups in terms of the correlational structure of the responses, which point to a number of hypotheses about risk perception in old and young drivers.