Pretest and Refinement of Items for Alcohol Highway Safety Surveys
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Summary
This 1984 report by Naomi H. Henderson details the pretesting and refinement of questionnaire items for alcohol highway safety surveys, commissioned by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The study was motivated by government concerns regarding drunk driving fatalities and the need to measure the effectiveness of programs aimed at reducing alcohol-related accidents. The primary objective was to evaluate various questionnaire forms for understanding, interpretability, response variability, and administration time to ensure they could be reliably used in continuing surveys. The research employed a mixed-methods approach involving focus groups and iterative telephone interviews. Initially, four focus groups were conducted in Philadelphia and Norfolk with licensed drivers who consumed alcohol. These sessions explored the ambiguity of key terms such as "drunk driving" and "alcohol-impaired driving." Subsequently, telephone pretests were conducted in multiple cities (including Hartford, Atlanta, Milwaukee, and San Diego) across two rounds to refine "Basic Core Questions." A final phase involved pilot testing three special survey forms—"General Deterrence," "Public Information & Education Emphasis," and a combined version—across eight cities to determine administration times and identify administrative issues. Participants were screened for valid driver’s licenses and recent alcohol consumption. Key findings indicated that while respondents understood "alcoholic beverage," definitions for "drunk driving" and related terms were not universal. Respondents struggled to forecast probabilities of being caught or punished when asked to generate their own numbers; however, providing a scale improved accuracy. The study also found that disclosing the study sponsor (NHTSA) and random selection at the start of calls increased willingness to answer sensitive questions. Administration times for the finalized forms ranged from 10 to 13 minutes. The process resulted in five finalized questionnaire forms, including a reference set of 35 "Core Questions." Specific revisions included breaking up agree/disagree formats, reordering questions to follow logical patterns, and converting open-ended questions into closed formats to reduce respondent difficulty. The significance of this work lies in the production of validated, standardized instruments for assessing public attitudes and behaviors regarding drinking and driving. By resolving ambiguities in terminology and optimizing question structure, the report provides NHTSA and other agencies with reliable tools to evaluate deterrence and education campaigns. The findings offer practical guidelines for survey design, emphasizing the importance of clear scaling for probability questions and transparent identification of sponsors to enhance data quality in sensitive public health research.
Key finding
Respondents require provided scales to accurately forecast probabilities of being caught for drunk driving, and administration times for the finalized survey forms ranged from 10 to 13 minutes.
Methodology
mixed_methods
Sample size: 126
Provenance
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| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| extract | success | cached | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-10 |
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| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 3 | 2026-06-10 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 19 | 2026-06-11 |
| verify | partial | — | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-10 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-10; verification: verified_with_issues.
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- Empirical Findings: observational prevalence