Research In Action

Research In Action

moving needle on teen driver safety
Moving the Needle On Teen Driver Safety
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Author's note: To celebrate National Teen Driver Safety Week, we are sharing excerpts from three articles about young driver safety research being conducted at the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Links to the full Cornerstone posts are included at the end of the excerpts. 

CHOP Researchers Lead Largest Driver's Ed Study Since 1983

Researchers in the Center for Injury Research and Prevention (CIRP) at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have spent more than a decade studying the common crash risks that young drivers face and the skills they need to avoid them.

That's critical, considering that motor vehicle crashes are a leading cause of death for U.S. teenagers, said Flaura Winston, MD, PhD, professor of pediatrics and CIRP founder.

Now, researchers from CHOP and the University of Pennsylvania are enrolling 1,000 teens into the first randomized controlled trial since 1983 to evaluate pre-licensure driver training on crash risk outcomes.

The study, funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), is led by Dr. Winston; Elizabeth Walshe, PhD, CIRP senior research scientist, and Dan Romer, PhD, research director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at Penn and an affiliate research scientist at CIRP. 

“It’s like you are born knowing how to drive -- it's a skill you need to learn," Dr. Winston said. "We're putting young people behind thousands of pounds of machinery without the skills to know how to manage it safely." 

The DRIVER study will not only test different types of driver training programs, but also will measure how other factors -- like personality traits, cognitive abilities, and risk-taking behaviors -- influence young drivers’ crash risk.

"Ultimately, we want to identify the best training that teenagers need in order to have the best chance to have safe, equitable mobility,” Dr. Winston said.

Read the full Cornerstone blog post.

Improving Independent Mobility for Autistic Adolescents

For many teens, the freedoms that come with obtaining a driver’s license are more than the ability to change the music on the radio and traveling from place to place without relying on parents. For many, driving is a critical step towards independence in the transition from adolescence to adulthood. With funding through the New Jersey Department of Health, investigators in the Center for Injury Research and Prevention (CIRP) at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) are developing novel tools and resources to help autistic adolescents stay mobile, whether they plan to drive or not.

Allison E. Curry, PhD, MPH, a senior scientist and director of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at CIRP, first studied driving outcomes among autistic adolescents through the lens of increased risk. Surveys conducted alongside Patty Huang, MD, a clinician in the Autism Integrated Care Program and the Division of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics at CHOP, indicated that two-thirds of autistic teens expressed interest in driving, but few studies reported on how many were licensed, their age when licensed, and how their road to getting licensed differed from their non-autistic peers. 

"I decided to take a different, more strengths-based approach," Dr. Curry said. "I wanted to study more from the perspective of supporting the decision to drive rather than focusing on risk."

With this new focus in mind and support from the CHOP Foerderer Award, Dr. Curry and her colleagues found that 1 in 3 autistic adolescents were getting their license, which highlighted a disconnect between the proportion of teens interested in driving and those who achieved licensure. This led Dr. Curry and her team to investigate how families make the decision to drive or find other ways to achieve independent mobility, available resources, and how best to support those teens and young adults who choose not to drive. 

"Now that we have a firm understanding of how parents and their autistic teens feel about driving and other ways to get around, our goal is to start making these learning modules and resources so that they can be available to families who really need them," Dr. Curry explained. 

The Empowering Transport Among Autistic Adolescents (ETA) program, funded by the New Jersey Governor's Council for Medical Research and Treatment of Autism, will build upon this research to establish a driver education framework on an interactive website that parents and autistic adolescents can use as they progress from early adolescence to independent mobility. 

Read the full Cornerstone post.

NJ-SHO Center: Driving Traffic Safety Research Further

Leaders of the New Jersey Safety and Health Outcomes (NJ-SHO) Center for Integrated Data at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) are rethinking how safety and health data are collected, integrated, analyzed, and shared in the state of New Jersey. At the Center's foundation is a data warehouse that is a comprehensive resource for researchers who have access to longitudinal information about health and safety on 24 million individuals of all ages spanning almost 20 years.

The Center's new website features an interactive people-focused data dashboard enabling users to visualize, monitor, and track important traffic safety measures across communities and over time. The dashboard captures demographic and community characteristics of people like where they live, and what their driving experiences are — going far beyond crash data.

"If we just had crash report data, we would have no idea what characteristics those who crashed share, and so, we would have no idea how those characteristics are connected to crash risk and their long-term outcomes," said Allison E. Curry, PhD, MPH, the Center's principal investigator. 

The Center uses rigorous data integration methods to link administrative datasets. This includes motor vehicle crash reports, driver licensing and citation records, hospital discharges, birth and death certificates, and CHOP electronic health records.

"Our mission is to promote a safe and healthy New Jersey through innovative data linkage and data sharing to support community-based solutions that reduce injury and death," said injury epidemiologist Kristi Metzger, PhD, the Center's director. "By linking records for the same persons across datasets, their experiences can be seen within the larger context of their lives."

Read the full Cornerstone blog post.