Intervening to Improve the Safety of Delivery Drivers

Summary

This monograph reviews seven field studies that evaluated behavior-based interventions designed to increase safe-driving practices of pizza deliverers. Intervention strategies focused primarily on variations of goal-setting and feedback techniques, including: (a) non-numerical goals in an awareness and promise card intervention; (b) non-numerical goals mandated as company policy; (c) participative and assigned group goal setting paired with feedback; (d) group goal setting and feedback with added public individualized feedback; (e) individualized feedback and competition; and (f) private individualized feedback paired with dynamic, static, or dynamic and static goals. An additional intervention evaluated a community program in which pizza deliverers acted as behavior change agents for safety-belt use. Two models of intervention effectiveness were evaluated for their ability to help practitioners design interventions that maximize both short-term and long-term impacts as well as desirable response generalization. The amounts of individual involvement, peer support, response information, and external consequences influenced the beneficial impacts of the interventions. Additionally, maintenance of behavior change after the interventions were withdrawn varied directly with the degree of peer support and involvement in the interventions' designs. Employee involvement increased the amount of desirable response generalization while external consequences seemed to be associated with undesirable spread of effect presumed to be countercontrol.

Key Words:

• Driving safety
• goal setting
• feedback
• response generalization