Studying Near-miss Accidents instead of Crashes: Psychometric Characteristics of Near-miss Traffic Accidents Scale in Lithuanian Sample

Austėja Kiliutė, Goda Skinkytė, Tadas Vadvilavičius

Studying Near-miss Accidents instead of Crashes: Psychometric Characteristics of Near-miss Traffic Accidents Scale in Lithuanian Sample

Číslo: 2/2025
Periodikum: Transactions on Transport Sciences
DOI: 10.5507/tots.2025.013

Klíčová slova: Near-miss traffic accidents; errors and lapses; real traffic accidents; reliability; validity

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Anotace: Purpose. Road traffic accidents (RTA) still are a major problem that causes health problems or death. However, it is difficult to study RTA since relatively small amount of them happen. For this reason, researchers turn to near-miss traffic accidents as construct that can be related to RTAs. Though near-miss traffic accidents are included in research, evidence about reliability and validity of measurement instruments are still lacking. Due to that this study aim: - to examine near-miss traffic accidents scale psychometric characteristics.

Method: This research involved two different age (young and middle-aged drivers and older drivers) drivers' groups. Young and middle-aged drivers' group consisted of 114 participants (50 males; age M = 27.08; SD = 9.66). Older drivers' group contained 260 drivers (144 males; M = 68.44; SD = 6.92). Participants had to complete Near-miss traffic accidents scale (Kurita et al., 2023; Makizaco et al., 2018), Driver Behavior questionnaire (DBQ) (Parker et al., 1995), questions about sociodemographic aspects and experience of real traffic accidents.

Results: This research showed that Near-miss traffic accidents scale was reliable in both drivers' groups. Confirmatory factor analysis suggested that scale has one factor and can be used to make valid comparisons between both drivers' groups. Results from older drivers' group confirmed that scale correlates with DBQ's errors and lapses subscales which shows scale's construct validity. However, results about scale relationship with age, gender and real traffic accidents experience are different in both drivers' groups.

Discussion: While some results in this study confirm Near-miss traffic accidents reliability and validity, other results do not allow to do reasonable conclusions about this instrument psychometric characteristics. It is crucial to continue investigating this scale in order to understand if results differences showing in this research are due to instrument flaws or methodological aspects of this study.