Searching for Predictors of Safe Driving Behaviour as an Important Activity in Achieving an Integrated Traffic System. Research on the Behavioural Criterion of the Psychometric Test Validity for Drivers

Abstract

Safety in road traffic as a system in which there are dynamic interactions between its different users depends on how integrated it is. In this system, drivers are a favoured group of users. Unfortunately they are also the most dangerous group, as research shows. Studying the causes of dangerous driving behaviour is still important. The paper aims to present the psychometric methodology to define the diagnostic and prognostic validity of some psychometric tests used by transport psychologists. Our statistical analysis included the four experimental groups of professional drivers with motor vehicle accident and one control group of drivers whose road performance had no motor vehicle accident recordings. The novelty of the study presented here is in linking the psychometric tests outcomes of professional road drivers (city bus drivers, school bus drivers, taxi drivers, ambulance drivers, fire trucks drivers, police drivers, military vehicle drivers, special vehicle drivers etc.) and their behavioral safety performance on public roads (i.e. causing road accidents, road collisions, participating in accidents but not causing it, and participating in road collision but not causing it) – which aims to indicate the diagnostic and prognostic validity of these tests for drivers. Discriminatory analysis based on Fisher ĝ-function was used to find discrepancies between the specific test outcomes of the road drivers in the control group and the four risky behaviour groups. The identified discrepancies are interpreted in terms of equivalence between the diagnostic and prognostic validity of the taken into consideration psychometric tools used by psychologists for diagnosing road drivers.