Development of the Questionnaire on Non-Driving Related Tasks (QNDRT) in automated driving: revealing age and gender differences

ABSTRACT

Automated vehicles (AVs) enable driver-passengers to perform non-driving related tasks (NDRTs). However, it remains unclear if and how they would engage with NDRTs. Therefore, we developed a questionnaire on NDRTs, the QNDRT, for SAE Level 3 (L3) and 5 (L5) driving automation. It comprises 24 items with a general NDRT Work subscale querying general aspects of working while driving in an AV (8 items; L3: 4 items, L5: 4) and a specific NDRT Communication subscale assessing different communication modalities (16 items; L3: 8, L5: 8). Hence, we carried out a cross-sectional questionnaire study and queried 725 participants (351 female, 374 male) from 18 to 96 years. We applied factor analyses and extracted a stable unidimensional factor structure for both NDRT subscales with good psychometric properties (e.g. high and clear factor loadings; satisfactory communalities, item discrimination, and internal consistency). The initial findings revealed that significantly smaller values were assigned to both subscale factors by participants older than 55 years in contrast to younger ones and by women when compared to men. The QNDRT can be used in future (quasi-)experimental L3 and L5 studies and in population surveys to obtain more insight into working and communicating while driving in an AV.

KEYWORDS:

• Questionnaire development
• automated driving
• non-driving related tasks
• age
• gender

Acknowledgments

We applied the SDC approach for the sequence of authors. We are thankful to Daniel Eisele, Lena von der Grün, Leonie Pietsch, Marina Stiegler, and Moritz Wischert-Zielke for their assistance in data collection.

Disclosure statement

We want to mention that the data of the QNDRT have been sampled together with a second questionnaire on the acceptance of automated driving (QAAD; Weigl et al., 2021). However, these two questionnaires are distinct and extending each other, (i) with different and disjoint data sets, (ii) with different research questions, (iii) with a newly written and partly different method section, (iv) ultimately resulting in an entirely different and new abstract, introduction, results section, discussion, and conclusion.

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by the ‘Innovative Hochschule’ programme of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) [Grant No. 03IHS109A] (MenschINBewegung).