Riders are urged to take part in a major survey on attitudes to road safety strategies which has so far only received responses from four motorcyclists.
Click HERE to take part in the survey!
Dr João Canoquena of the University of Notre Dame Australia, says the final round of the survey now requires rider support to help balance the outcomes.
The survey covers community concerns about road safety strategies such as speed enforcement, wire rope barriers, roadside breath/drug testing, speed cameras, graduated licensing schemes and more.
He says the survey is confidential.
“No individual participant will be identified to a third party,” he says.
“The results will only be used as aggregate outcomes. Once analysed, the data will be destroyed.”
Negative feedback
The survey author has responded to some of the negative feedback on the complexity of the survey:
Please read this from the survey author:
Thank you all for the comments, especially those which pinpoint the specific weaknesses of the survey. In fact, surveys of this nature are never easy to either design or explain. This is a survey whose aim is to develop a scale (i.e. a list of evaluative statements, which allow strategies to be measured, assessed and improved upon). Scale development surveys tend to be long and rather repetitive as the idea is to select the scale items with the highest validity score, a type of elimination exercise in which the statements with the most valid score are retained. If respondents are inconsistent in their answers, these answers are not retained by the computer. Therefore, the designer builds a large (rather than a small) number of questions into the survey. Giving up may have appeared to be the right thing to do at the time. However, for every person who gives up halfway through the survey, the scale development suffers a major setback. It relies on numbers. The larger the sample, the more reliable the results are likely to be. Therefore, I would urge everyone out there who has not completed the survey to do so. Persevere through it as best as you possibly can. It is not meant to be easy. In the end, we hope to create a new process-oriented policy instrument for developing and evaluating road safety strategies from a community’s perspective.
Riders under-represented
Dr João says there were only four people in the original survey who nominated motorbike as the main means of transport to work, place of leisure or education.
“This small number limits the sorts of analyses one can conduct,” he says.
“I would like to have more motorcyclists in the sample.
Dr João says a bigger response from motorcyclists would provide answers to questions about the strategies specific to riders such as wire rope barriers.
Safety survey
His project started with a pilot survey, following the analysis of 544 written public submissions to the former Australian Transport Council.
“The point the study seems to be making is that there are sentiments in the community that do not seem to be picked up by policy design,” he says.
“Those in charge of policy design do not seem to be aware that the negativity in the community has a wide range of nuances.
“It is not about people supporting or not a strategy. There is a wide range of emotions associated with some strategies, which may include disbelief, refutation, dissent etc.
“There are those who are not happy or resent certain policies, but will always be rather passive. There are others, however, who are starting to refuse certain policies. They will grow more disenchanted unless there is some sort of redress.”