Chapter 6 – Naturalistic Driving Studies and Data Coding and Analysis Techniques

Publisher Summary This chapter describes the traffic conflict technique and the theory behind the power of instrumented vehicle or naturalistic driving studies, the life cycle of naturalistic driving studies, and powerful analytic techniques that can and have been used with these data. Naturalistic driving data provide powerful tools for safety researchers that incorporate some characteristics of epidemiological data analysis techniques with empirical data analysis techniques. Although these characteristics are very beneficial, they also provide novel new data and analytic methods in which to explore and study driver safety, specifically driver behavior. The life cycle of naturalistic driving studies includes the following: study design and data collection, data preparation and storage, data coding, and data analysis. Each of these steps is complex primarily due to the size and the extent of the data being collected. Naturalistic driving studies typically collect 6–8 gigabytes of video per minute, which can easily result in thousands of hours of video collected, and 6–10 TB of data that must be prepared, stored, coded, and analyzed. Naturalistic driving studies are typically lengthy and resource-intensive but worth the rich, detailed data that can be collected. These types of studies are complex and require extensive planning both prior to data collection and through the entire life cycle of the study to ensure that the initial research objectives are appropriately evaluated. Detailed planning at every step in the life cycle will result in a much easier and efficient data analysis phase of the project.