Relations between adolescent sensation seeking and traffic injury: Multiple-mediating effects of road safety attitudes, intentions and behaviors

Abstract

Objective: Road traffic injuries to youth are a serious global public health concern. One contributor to adolescent injury risk is the tendency to engage in sensation seeking behaviors. The current study examined how sensation seeking personality might directly influence adolescent traffic injury, as well as how it might indirectly influence traffic injury as mediated by road safety attitudes, intentions, and behaviors.

Methods: 4470 adolescents of 10–15 years were recruited from 29 primary and secondary schools in China. Youth completed several self-report questionnaires, including measures of sensation seeking, road safety attitudes and intentions, and road user behaviors. Spearman correlations and logistic regression tested the direct effects of sensation seeking, road safety attitudes, road behavior intentions, and road user behaviors on traffic injury. Structural Equation Modeling evaluated a multiple mediation model of road safety attitudes, intentions, and behaviors as mediators of the association between sensation seeking and adolescent traffic injury.

Results: Correlation coefficients between traffic injury and the other variables ranged from 0.01 to 0.15, with moderate relations emerging between adolescent traffic injury and most other variables. Logistic regression analysis showed that Disinhibition sensation seeking, road safety attitudes, and road user behaviors predicted adolescent traffic injury significantly (OR = 1.03, 0.35, 2.99, respectively). The multiple mediation model analysis indicated that, after controlling for adolescent gender and age, most paths were significant: both road safety attitudes and road user behaviors mediated the association between Disinhibition and traffic injury, and road safety attitudes, road behavior intentions, and road user behaviors sequentially mediated the relation between Disinhibition and traffic injury.

Conclusions: There were direct effects of Disinhibition sensation seeking, road safety attitudes, and road user behaviors on adolescent traffic injury. Sensation seeking also indirectly affected adolescent traffic injury through multiple mediating roles of road safety attitudes, intentions, and behaviors. Implications for traffic injury prevention and training are discussed.

Keywords:

• Adolescents
• sensation seeking
• road traffic injury
• road user behavior
• multiple mediating effect

Acknowledgments

We thank the students from 29 primary and secondary schools for their participation, and the teachers from these schools for their assistance with the survey. We also thank Zhang Jing and Wu Peng for assistance with collecting data. Finally, we acknowledge Wu Mengying and Cheng Xuebing for assistance with coding and preliminary data analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences [grant number 16YJC880072]. This research was also supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the United States National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01HD088415. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.