Children's perception of safety and danger on the road

Ampofo‐Boateng, Kwame; Thomson, James A. · 1991 · Crossref

DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1991.tb02415.x

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Summary

This study investigates the ability of children aged 5 to 11 to identify safe and dangerous road-crossing locations, addressing a critical gap in road safety education. While programs like the Green Cross Code teach mechanical crossing rules, they assume children can inherently recognize safe sites. The authors hypothesize that young children lack the perceptual skills to identify intrinsically dangerous environments, such as those with restricted visibility or complex junctions, leaving them at risk even in quiet suburban areas where official crossing facilities are absent. The research employed four experiments using varied methodologies to assess recognition and route construction skills. Experiment 1 utilized a table-top simulation with toy cars and obstacles. Experiment 2 controlled for perspective-taking issues by using photographs that matched the pedestrian’s viewpoint and removed moving cars. Experiment 3 used a forced-choice design, presenting paired safe and dangerous scenarios to compel children to identify danger beyond the presence of vehicles. Experiment 4 involved real-world assessments at actual street sites near schools. In all tasks, children were asked to judge safety and justify their reasoning, with responses evaluated by road safety officers. The results consistently demonstrated that the ability to recognize danger improves significantly with age. Five- and 7-year-olds exhibited poor performance, frequently misidentifying dangerous sites as safe. Their judgments relied exclusively on the visible presence or absence of cars; if no cars were visible, they deemed the location safe, ignoring critical hazards like blind summits, parked cars, hedges, or junctions. These younger children also showed a rigid preference for the shortest, most direct crossing routes, even when those routes were manifestly dangerous. In contrast, 9- and 11-year-olds demonstrated much higher competence, recognizing environmental obstacles and selecting safer, often more circuitous routes. No significant sex differences were found in these perceptual skills, despite known disparities in accident rates. The findings indicate that children under 9 lack the cognitive ability to assess environmental danger independently, rendering standard rule-based education insufficient for this age group. The study concludes that road safety training must explicitly teach children to identify hazardous locations and understand that the absence of visible traffic does not guarantee safety. The authors suggest that current educational measures fail because they do not address these fundamental perceptual deficits, implying a need for more sophisticated training that targets the recognition of intrinsic environmental risks.

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• child pedestrian