Performance differences of individuals classified by questionnaire as accident prone or non-accident prone

Abstract

A questionnaire (APQ) was designed to investigate accident proneness. The questionnaire was analysed to identify individuals who believed themselves to be accident prone (APS) and individuals who believed themselves to be non-accident prone (NAPS), and provide information concerning the circumstances in which minor accidents occur. Two groups of subjects were defined, ten APS and ten NAPS, and the circumstances in which minor accidents happened to them were identified. It appeared that individuals had minor accidents when they were not attending fully to the particular situation in which the incident occurred. Therefore, a dual task experiment was run, such that subjects were unable to concentrate fully on a blind reach task. This used a computer based unidimensional tracking task, requiring prediction, as a primary task and the decoding of an auditory tone, followed by the blind reach to the corresponding target, as the secondary one. The secondary task gave a choice of eight targets, identified by tones. Data were collected on all aspects of both primary and secondary tasks.

The APS performance at the primary task was found to be significantly worse than the NAPS on all occasions.

The APS performance at the blind reach task was also significantly worse, on some occasions, in terms of time taken to find the target centre. Further experimentation would be required to identify the precise nature of the aspect of performance differences between the two groups and correlates with the APQ before firm conclusions could be drawn.

Keywords:

• Accident proneness
• Questionnaire
• Motor skill