Applying the Safe System Approach to Transportation Planning, Design, and Operations (2025)
Chapter: Survey Development and Measures
Survey Development and Measures
The research team developed the survey instrument iteratively and in close coordination with the project panel. The survey was pilot tested with panel members, and the research team and project panel landed on an agreed-on approach: to present various domain-specific safety practices to participants and ask them to rate the practices according to two dimensions across six practice domains (i.e., Design, Enforcement, Operations and Maintenance, Planning, Policy, and Post-Crash Response):
- Impact—a practice’s ability to address large, trending, or urgent road safety issues; and
- Feasibility—the technical, political/social, budgetary, and legal constraints associated with implementing a practice.
Supporting participants’ appraisal of safety practices were questions about their professional role and tenure in the field, elements of their organizational climate that portend openness to instituting practices aligned with the Safe System paradigm, and insights into opinion leadership in the transportation safety realm, which will guide the research team’s guidance-diffusion efforts. Each of these supporting questions and constructs are reviewed next.
Professional Role.
Participants’ professional role was measured using a single question about their primary role in transportation. They were directed to select only one response option, their main role. Response options included:
- Design of roads and streets
- Emergency management, such as emergency medical services
- Law enforcement
- Maintenance of roads and related facilities
- Planning
- Policy, including transportation policy
- Public health, such as epidemiology or injury prevention
- Research
- Road and street operations
- I have a different role: ___________.
Participants’ responses to this question determined the domain-specific safety practices with which they were presented and asked to appraise according to the dimensions of perceived impact and feasibility. It is worth noting that public health professionals were assigned to the Post-Crash Response domain and associated safety practices, whereas those in research or “other” fields were assigned to the Policy domain. All other professionals were assigned to the domain that aligned with their specialization (e.g., road designers were assigned to the Design domain and road operators to the Operations and Maintenance domain).
Professional Tenure.
This was measured using a single question pertaining to the number of years respondents had worked in their reported role. Response options included whole numbers and in cases of less than one year, respondents were asked to enter “1” into the text field.
Organizational Climate.
In designing measures of organizational climate, the team borrowed the normative approach to item development employed by Patterson and colleagues (2005) to elicit participants perceptions of how others (e.g., colleagues, managers) in their organizations typically behaved or thought about traffic safety issues and procedures. We made use of this “normative notion”
approach rather than asking participants about their own perceptions, as we conceived of an organization’s climate as an emergent property of a group, rather than a simple aggregation of individuals’ psychological content (e.g., for a substantial discussion on this subject see: Van de Vijver et al., 2011). The team drew upon three distinct constructs to assess respondents’ organizational climate:
- Innovativeness. An organization high in innovativeness is open to experimenting with novel ideas and practices and remains flexible when performance measures indicate a need to alter strategy. Items measured on a 4-point “Definitely False” to “Definitely True” Likert scale: “Senior management like to keep to established, traditional ways of doing traffic safety” (reverse coded); “New ideas on how to address traffic safety are readily accepted here,” “Management are not interested in trying out new ideas to improve road user safety” (reverse coded); “Management here are quick to spot the need to do traffic safety work differently,” and “People in this organization are always searching for new ways of looking at traffic safety problems.”
- Individualism. This construct relates to the impulse to blame bad outcomes on individuals’ choices while obscuring these outcomes’ roots in our collective institutions and systems. Items measured on a 4-point “Definitely False” to “Definitely True” True Likert scale: “People here know that traffic safety mostly depends on road users being sober and alert”; “People here believe that road users are mostly responsible for their own safety”; and “People here are convinced that safe travel is beyond the control of individual road users” (reverse coded).
- Fatalism. This is a common cultural mindset, one that relates to the tacit, implicit assumption that traffic safety problems are insurmountable and that change efforts are bound to fail. Items measured on a 4-point “Definitely False” to “Definitely True” Likert scale: “There is talk here about how zero fatalities is impossible to achieve”; “People here believe we can build a system where no one dies” (reverse coded); and “Management here often say we can reduce, but never eliminate road deaths.”
Opinion Leaders.
The team employed a method to identify those professionals from whom participants most often seek transportation safety-related advice. Individuals referenced most frequently by others are considered “opinion leaders” (e.g., Dearing, 2009; LaJeunesse et al., 2018). The identification of these professionals will aid the research team in more rapidly diffusing project-developed guidance. That is, if a few opinion leaders endorse our team’s Safe System implementation guidance, professionals in their networks are more likely to notice these endorsements, to judge the guidance more favorably, and to experiment with using and applying the guidance (see: Dearing, 2009; Van Eck et al., 2011).
Safety Practices.
The team conceived of safety practices as possessing three sometimes interlacing dimensions:
- First, we adopted the Cambridge Dictionary definition of a practice as “something that is usually or regularly done, often as a habit, tradition, or custom” (Practice, 2023).
- Further, in the context of Safe System implementation, a “safety practice” can also mean an intervention or program that significantly reduces the likelihood or severity of road user exposure to human-intolerable kinetic energy transfer; and
- A safety practice can be applied routinely or over a broad area (e.g., from corridor to district to village/town/city to county to region to state).
