Accidents of bus drivers : an epidemiological approach
暂无分享,去创建一个
textabstractIn the history of accident research much emphasis has been laid
on general statistics, different types of case studies concentrating
on various personal factor-s, circumstantial influences etc.
Often, in certain waves, the unequal initial liability theory
(the accident proneness concept; Greenwood and Woods, 1919), the
search for personality traits, determining a personal vulnerability
for accidents, dominated the research programs. Apart from
methodological criticism (e.g. Arbous and Kerrich, 1953) other
theories evolved (Hale & Hale, 1972), like the adjustment/stress
theory (Kerr, 1950), situational and task-related theories (e.g.
Winsemius, 1969; Surry, 1969) or the domino theory (Heinrich,
1950). Additionally, under the influence of ideas formalised in
epidemiology accidents tended to be regarded as one of the "modern
epidemics", and should be approached with epidemiological
methods (Gordon, 1949; McFarland et al, 1955).
Of course, accidents have some relation to health problems (injury,
death) although the causal association between the occurrence
of accidents and an eventual health problem is not fully understood.
This applies to accidents in general as well as to traffic
accidents.
One of the first comprehensive studies in this respect was "The
causation of bus driver accidents; An Epidemiological study" published
by Cresswell and Froggatt in 1963.
Not only the title, but also the methods used in this thesis, is
inspired by this epidemiological tradition in accident research.
In the interpretation of the results, however, links have been
made with physiological, psychological and ergonomic theories.
In 1977 a start was made at the Netherlands Institute for Preventive
Health Care/TNO with a project, of which the purpose could
roughly be defined as follows: to develop a useful measuring instrument
capable of demonstrating the (assumed) effect of the
performance of a task on the task performer and, assuming that
this would prove possible, to ascertain to what extent the task
effect changes under different task conditions. After a series of
discussions with the members of the Steering Committee for Indusltrial Health Care of the Royal Netherlands Association of Transport
Companies, in which employers, workers and industrial
health-care are represented, it was decided to set up a project
for examining the effect of the bus driver's task on the individual
bus driver.
The project contained two different studies: I. an experimental
field study involving various psychometric and physiological measurements
- results of this study will be reported elsewhere;
II. this thesis and the papers of which it is composed, concerns
the other part of the project: an accident analysis; this analysis
has been carried aut on the accidents of the bus drivers employed
by a large bus company in the Western part of the Netherlands.
It was assumed that the occurrence of a traffic-accident could
contain information about possible effects of the task performance
of a bus driver, and of the conditions of this task, on the
performer.
This accident study contains two parts. An initial explorative
investigation of the accidents in one branch could be followed by
a second study of the accidents of another branch of the same bus
company. In this second part the hypotheses derived from the results
of the first part were tested.
The topics of interest that will be dealt with in this thesis are
theoretical and practical problems of accident research, associations
of accident risk with some personal factors like age and
experience, and with environmental (task-related) factors like
type of shift and time on task.