Traffic Safety Online Survey Tool

M Street worked with Eastern Virginia Medical School, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and Transanalytics to deliver a survey tool for focus groups that measures the impact of marketing efforts made to inform the public on child passenger safety.

The methodology involves a web based interface, similar to Survey Monkey, but allows for one of five marketing posters, chosen at random, to be shown between pre- and post-survey. Essentially, the user is asked a series of questions, shown a poster at random and, after viewing the poster, is asked another series of questions. The two surveys are compared to measure the effectiveness of each poster.

Our system collected the demographic data and recorded answers from each user to deliver data to the client who wrote the attached report.

Safe Transportation of Children

A large number of studies over the past decade have involved some type of intervention to increase the correct use of child restraints, including booster seats and seat belts. Most of these efforts included educational material and messages as part of the interventions. However, very few of these studies dealt specifically with evaluation of the messaging associated with these interventions.

For those studies that looked at messaging, research suggests that messages that increase parents’ feelings of vulnerability to risk and provide succinct and concrete educational messages about the injury prevention benefits of car seats will be most likely to increase correct use of child restraints for children.

Research also indicates it is important to depict negative consequences in parental safety messages in order to effectively communicate danger and evoke attention and concern. Combating parents’ low perceptions of risk for motor vehicle injury will likely be difficult since the risk of being involved in a crash on any given vehicle trip is very small, which in turn reinforces the perception of minimal risk.