Qualitative consumer input for enhancing child restraint product information to prevent misuse: preliminary results

Child restraint system misuse is a global public health issue leading to increased risk of injury and death in motor vehicle crashes. Although some interventions are effective at reducing misuse, they are prohibitively costly to adopt at a population-level. We aim to develop a novel, consumer-driven intervention to counter misuse embedded in product information supplied with child restraints. If effective, this cost efficient measure can be broadly implemented via product standards. The first stage of this project involved using a semi-structured discussion guide to conduct six in-depth focus groups (7V= 44; 95% female) to elicit problems and preferences with current product information. There are some distinctions between the different populations of child restraint users sampled here (i.e., reliance on graphics versus text instruction), but preliminary results suggest that at a minimum, restructuring information, improving graphics, removing text, and providing links to other sources of information will increase the attractiveness and ease of understanding instructions and labels supplied with child restraint systems