Brief Report: Increasing Children’s Safe Pedestrian Behaviors through Simple Skills Training

Objectives Hundreds of American children are killed and thousands more injured annually as pedestrians. Simple and effective interventions targeting behavioral changes in children are needed. Methods The present study tested a simple, skill-based training method for increasing safe pedestrian behaviors. Eighty-five children ages 5–8 participated. Results Children behaved more safely following training, indicating very brief training can produce at least short-term improvements in pedestrian behaviors. Conclusions Results are discussed with regard to the involvement of parents in the practical application of a simple training procedure and future directions for pedestrian interventions. Key words injury prevention; pedestrian safety; training and intervention; unintentional injury. Nearly 900 American children are killed annually as pedestrians, and an additional estimated 60,000 American children incur moderate to severe pedestrian injuries [National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC), 2005]. A variety of pedestrian injury prevention techniques have been tested, but success from these programs has been mixed (Duperrex, Bunn, & Roberts, 2002). Multiple risk factors contribute to pediatric pedes-trian injuries. The physical environment is partly to blame (e.g., inexperienced or perceptually impaired drivers, poor traffic engineering, and high traffic volumes). Such factors are most often addressed by passive injury prevention techniques, such as traffic lights with pedestrian signals, crosswalks, speed bumps, and side-walks (Retting, Ferguson, & McCartt, 2003). Along with environmental factors, behavioral factors also contribute to pediatric pedestrian injury risk (e.g., darting out between cars). Addressing this issue necessitates active, behaviorally oriented interventions (Duperrex et al., 2002). The most common method is through teaching and modeling, usually in combination with fairly extensive group lectures and/or behavioral rewar