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Abstract
The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between college students’ level of driver anger and their aggressive communication traits. Driving anger is an individual's tendency to become angry while driving. In 1994 the driving anger scale (DAS) identified six dimensions of driver anger: hostile gestures, illegal driving, police presence, slow driving, discourtesy, and traffic obstructions. Results of Pearson correlations show that police presence, slow driving, discourteous driving, and traffic obstructions were positively related to all of the aggressive communication traits. “Hostile gestures” was related to assertiveness. Illegal driving was related to indirect verbal aggression and assertiveness.
Notes
1. Given the criticisms of the Mach IV scale for measuring Machiavellianism (Mudrack & Mason, Citation1995), we used the Machiavellianism scale in this study. Since the Machiavellianism scale has not been used extensively in communication research, we conducted a confirmatory factor analysis. A model was tested that treated the Machiavellianism scale as a one-dimension instrument. The goodness of fit index and the comparative fit index were both 0.91. These values indicate that the measurement model provided a good fit to the data (Hatcher, Citation1994). However, the non-normed index was below 0.90 and the significant χ 2 test had a 5:1 ratio. These values suggest that the model was not a good fit to the data. More information on this analysis can be obtained by contacting the third author.