Reducing Distracted Driving Among Adults: Child-to-Adult Interventions [Traffic Tech]

NHTSA · 2022 · ROSA P / United States. Department of Transportation. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Office of Behavioral Safety Research

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Summary

This report evaluates the effectiveness of child-to-adult interventions designed to reduce distracted driving among adults. While existing countermeasures typically target drivers directly, this study explores a novel approach where younger students intervene with their parents or caregivers. The potential benefits are twofold: reducing immediate distracted driving behaviors in targeted adults and instilling safer habits in children who will eventually become licensed drivers. The study was conducted by the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the Governors Highway Safety Administration. The research focused on the EndDD/SRA program, a collaboration between End Distracted Driving and the Safe Roads Alliance, which was the only program meeting specific evaluation criteria. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the intervention was delivered online. Elementary school students received a 30-minute prerecorded video lesson, while high school students participated in an interactive 70-minute virtual session. Data were collected via pre- and post-lesson surveys. The study gathered 459 pre-lesson and 196 post-lesson responses from eight high schools, and 118 pre-lesson and 34 post-lesson responses from five elementary schools. High school surveys assessed attitudes, knowledge, and behavior frequencies across 17 subcategories, whereas elementary surveys were shorter and focused on specific topics like talking or texting. Results for high school students showed statistically significant improvements in nine of the 17 subcategories, including knowledge of distracted driving, the right words to use for intervention, and confidence in intervening. Notably, there was an increase in reported interventions with parents and passengers engaging in distracting activities, and a decrease in students’ subjective estimates of how much their parents and friends engaged in such behaviors. However, there was no change in students’ likelihood of engaging in distracting activities themselves. In contrast, results for elementary students were inconclusive; only one of nine tests showed a significant effect (increased knowledge), likely due to the small sample size and the passive nature of the video-only intervention. The study concludes that the high school program successfully increased student knowledge and intervention behaviors, though it remains unknown if these interventions actually changed adult driving behavior. The elementary program’s effectiveness could not be determined due to recruitment challenges and limited data. The authors emphasize that while the findings for high school students are promising, additional evaluation is necessary to confirm whether these child-to-adult interventions lead to sustained behavior changes in both parents and the students themselves.

Key finding

The high school child-to-adult intervention program successfully increased students' knowledge of distracted driving and their reported frequency of intervening with parental and passenger drivers, whereas the elementary school program's results were inconclusive.

Methodology

survey

Sample size: 807

Provenance

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Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-10; verification: verified.

Topics

Ranked by relevance to this paper. Hover a topic for its definition.

• driver education effectiveness
• parental management
• distraction laws

Information type

What kind of knowledge this paper contributes, grouped by family — independent of topic (what it is about) and method (how it was studied).

• Applied Guidance: countermeasure evaluation
• Empirical Findings: observational prevalence