Effect of the Application of the PRECEDE-PROCEED Model on Improving Traffic Safety

In Taiwan, 3.8 children die each day from injuries sustained in motor-vehicle accidents. The Ministry of Transportation and Communications mandated the use of child safety restraints, but the effectiveness of the law remains unclear. This study will evaluate the effectiveness of the newly enacted regulations to establish a baseline for the proposed intervention program. Based on the PRECEDE-PROCEED Model, the study will identify factors that impact the decisions to use or not use child-passenger safety protection to recommend an intervention campaign to increase the use of child restraints. Finally, the study will evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign. This study recorded the use of safety restraints in the parking lots of several kindergartens. Open-ended questionnaires, expert interviews, and focus groups were conducted to see what insights obstetricians, nurses, daycare personnel, elementary-school teachers, and parents offer. The results were used as the guiding principles to design and implement the intervention campaign. Daycare centers were selected and randomly assigned to two conditions. Those in the experimental condition participated in the intervention campaign while participants in the control group did not. Survey data were obtained from participants in both groups after the experiments. The study shows that 39.8 percent of child safety-restraint use and gender, adult seatbelt use, number of children in the vehicle, and age of the children all correlate with child seatbelt use. A PRECEDE-PROCEED-based campaign was effective in changing parents' behavior for parents in the experimental group reported significantly higher rate of safety-restraint use than parents in the control group.