Trauma survivors and the media: A qualitative analysis

While much has been written about how the media covers traumatic events, little is known about the impact of the media on trauma survivors. This, despite the fact that crime coverage has been a staple of daily news cycles for several decades. Likewise, little has been written about the training and methods of the journalists who cover these events, or the impact of this coverage on the journalists. Based on 71 qualitative surveys and interviews with homicide and traffic fatality survivors, and 22 qualitative surveys of journalists, this article serves to describe five main themes regarding survivor experiences: 1) Prior experience with the media; 2) First encounters with the media; 3) Negative impacts of the media; 4) Positive impacts of the media; and 5) Advice for various stakeholders. Additionally, this article will describe three main themes highlighted by the journalists: 1) Trauma-informed training and guidelines; 2) Comfort in contacting survivors; and 3) Personal impact of reporting on trauma. These findings illustrate a clear gap in services available to survivors, in particular in the immediate aftermath of traumatic events when media attention is often at its highest, as well as a lack of support for journalists covering these events.

Relating Household Consumption Expenditures to Road Traffic Fatalities: A Rural–Urban Study

Research shows that traffic fatality risk is generally higher in rural areas than in urban areas. In developing countries, vehicle ownership and investments in public transportation typically increase with economic growth. These two factors together increase the vehicle population, which in turn affects traffic safety. This paper presents a study focused on the relationship of various factors—including household consumption expenditure data—with traffic fatality in rural and urban areas and thereby aims to fill some of the gaps in the literature. One such gap is the impacts of personal and non-personal modes of travel on traffic safety in rural versus urban areas in developing countries which remains unexplored. An exhaustive panel data modeling approach is adopted. One important finding of this study is that evidence exists of a contrasting relationship between household expenditure and traffic fatality in rural and urban areas. The relationship between household expenditure and traffic fatality is observed to be positive in rural areas and a negative in urban areas. Increases in most expenditure variables, such as fuel, non-personal modes of travel, and two-wheeler expenditures, are found to be associated with an increase in traffic fatality in rural areas.

The Analysis of Road Traffic Fatality Pattern for Selangor, Malaysia Case Study

Road traffic fatality is a burden towards low- and middle-income countries including Malaysia. Seeing that Selangor has the highest number of road traffic fatalities in Malaysia for the year 2019, therefore the state is selected as a case study. The aim of the article is 1) to understand the road traffic crash pattern and road traffic fatality pattern in Selangor 2) to determine the ability of 16 road traffic features in classifying road traffic fatality occurrence. The preliminary data screening shows that road traffic crash patterns and road traffic fatality patterns in Selangor have many similarities. However, both of them also have few dissimilarities such as crash time of occurrence, day of occurrence, number of vehicles involved in a crash, and type of vehicle first hit for the crash. Supervised machine learning algorithm in Orange data mining software was considered in this analysis. The analysed algorithms among others are neural network, random forest, decision tree, logistic regression, naïve Bayes, and support vector machine. Neural network was seen as the best algorithm to classify road traffic fatality occurrence with 97.0% classification accuracy outperform other algorithms. The result of the article can be used by the relevant traffic stakeholders to execute safety intervention in a more focused manner in Selangor to reduce the number of road traffic fatalities.

Seat Belts and Second Chances

This chapter argues for a potentially high-impact but underutilized strategy: restricting or limiting access to highly lethal methods for suicide, especially firearms. It begins by describing the role of seatbelts in traffic fatality prevention. Prevention through design assumes that injuries, illnesses, and fatalities can be most effectively reduced or controlled by designing and building systems that eliminate or remove potential hazards from the very beginning, before they can cause any harm. If we shifted our mindset surrounding suicide prevention in a way that better aligned with the prevention through design approach underlying traffic fatality prevention, we might reconsider the considerable time, effort, and resources being devoted to the development and implementation of suicide risk identification and detection methods, and consider instead the potential impact of redirecting these efforts toward environmentally focused strategies that are more likely to reduce suicide rates. The chapter then considers the life-saving effects of laws and policies designed to reduce access to firearms, discussing firearm suicide in the United States.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HDI VALUES AND ROAD TRAFFIC FATALITY RATES

Road traffic accidents are a serious but an avoidable problem that cause both life and economic loss worldwide. There are some common factors such as income, education and health that affect both socioeconomic development and road traffic fatality rates of countries. Examination of these factors separately during the analyze of road traffic fatality rates might cause misleading results due to the relationships between stated variables. Thus, using an inclusive parameter like Human Development Index (HDI), may provide more realistic results. In the current study, the relationship between HDI, its dimensions (GNI per capita, expected years of schooling, mean years of schooling and life expectancy at birth) and road traffic fatality rates are examined. Hierarchical regression analysis was conducted in order to obtain results about the effects of each dimension of HDI. Results showed that all dimensions of HDI negatively predicted road traffic fatalities. Results have been discussed according to related literature and suggestions have been made for further research and applications.

Reaction behaviour of drivers to marked and unmarked road: Ghana perspective

Africa is the leading continent globally in the rate of road traffic fatalities, yet it is the least motorized compared to the other five continents. This predicament is said to be one of the leading cause of death among youth and generally, rated as one of the ten causes of death in the world. Exclusively, Ghana’s rate of traffic fatalities is growing despite the efforts invested in reducing it. Nevertheless, more focus needs to be invested in the traffic control systems such as traffic signals, signs or road markings. As this system tends to considerably reduce the number of conflicts and minimize road user’s errors. Furthermore, this system creates drivers’ expectations of the conditions which they will meet ahead and the driving tasks required. If misleading information is provided, or none is available, hazardous situations can result. Overall, this traffic system is inadequate or lacking in most developing countries as there are no proper maintenance strategies in place. Thus, this study investigates and evaluates the reaction of drivers to the marked and unmarked roads. Using random quantitative sampling methods, Ghanaian drivers were interviewed on their experiences when driving on the marked and unmarked road. Overall, this study will highlight the necessity of road markings in reducing traffic fatality rate and the psychological effect of the unavailability of road marking on drivers’ expectation and consequently, the effect on their behaviour in most developing countries.

Open Letter to Mothers against Drunk Driving

Although I shall be criticizing you, even severely, please do not take this amiss. I mean your organization no harm. Quite the contrary. My two children, in their early 20’s, are both new dri-vers. I would suffer more than I can tell you if anything were to happen to them as a result of drunken driving. I am thus a sup-porter of yours. I am on your side. Please take what I say as no more than friendly amendments to your plans and proposals. Some of the following critiques may sound harsh, but friends do not mince words with each other in life and death situations, and I would like you to consider me a friend of yours. We may disagree on means, but certainly not on ends. First, you must expand your scope of operations. While drunk driving is of course a major calamity on our nation’s roads, it is far from the only one. There are quite a few others, even besides the «big three» of speed, weather conditions and driver error1. What difference does it really make if our children and loved ones die in a traffic fatality emanating from drunkenness or any of these other conditions? Happily there is no need to change even the MADD name if you adopt this suggestion. Only instead of the first «D» standing for «drunk» it could refer to «death,» as in Mothers Against Death Drivers. All of these things —alco-hol, drugs, speeding, malfunctioning vehicles, badly engineered roads, weather conditions, whatever— are threats to our fami-ly’s lives. Why single out any one of them? A possible defense of the status quo is to borrow a leaf from the economists, and defend the present, limited, status of MADD on grounds of specialization and division of labor2. True, no one organization can do everything. Better to take on a limited agenda and do it well, than to take on too much and accomplish little or nothing.