Project R-12921

Looking through the eyes of young cyclists: large-scale evaluation of a comprehensive theory- and evidence-based online intervention targeting traffic safety behaviour. (Research)

Young cyclists are often involved in traffic incidents, however, more fundamental research is crucial to understand the causes. Traffic education can offer a solution, but education that is based on grounded theory and proven to successfully influence behaviour is lacking. This project is meant to advance the state-of-the-art in three ways: 1) to have a detailed overview of traffic behaviour of children, innovative naturalistic data will be collected by drones and action cameras, 2) the principles of Intervention Mapping will be followed in order to create a comprehensive theory- and evidence-based intervention, taking into account age and gender differences. Children and important stakeholders like parents will be involved in this process resulting in a user-centred intervention, 3) the intervention will be evaluated by means of an effect evaluation consisting of before-after studies using experimental and control groups and by collecting naturalistic data, simulator data and survey data. Also, a process evaluation will be conducted. In order to provide a large-scale evaluation study of this traffic safety intervention for young cyclists, the intervention will be given to 1000 children between 10 and 14 years in Flanders. This project will help (inter)national researchers and policy makers to measure cyclists' behaviour in an innovative way and to develop better-informed traffic safety interventions for children in order to decrease the number of traffic injuries.

01 October 2022 - 30 September 2023