What's in a word? Teens describe good drivers vs. safe drivers

Background / Purpose:

Injury prevention specialists acknowledge the importance of word choice in public health communications about teen driving. However, little attention has been paid to the implications of the use of the phrases “good driver” and “safe driver.” This project explores teen perceptions of these phrases using freelisting, a technique that spontaneously generates words that define a domain of interest and delimits the boundaries of that domain for specific cultural groups.

Methods:

Adolescents in grades 9-11 (age 15 – 17) at six high schools across the US participated in freelisting, a standard semi-structured interviewing technique was used to identify the element and boundaries of domains (ie, good drivers and safe drivers) and determined the relative salience or importance of words defining the domain. The research team reviewed the freelists, standardized word forms and combined synonyms. Anthropac © was used to generate salience scores for words that adolescents use and these results were sorted by gender, ethnicity, and license status.

Results / Outcomes:

193 teens differentiated between good drivers and safe drivers. They described good drivers as skillful and safe drivers as careful. They were twice as likely to use the word “seatbelts” to describe a safe driver. Subgroups each had different concepts of a good driver and a safe driver.

Conclusions:

Public health professionals need to attend to the implicit meanings that teens attach to everyday terms. Encouraging teens to become good rather than safe drivers may be prompting them subliminally to engage in behaviors for which they lack experience.