By Sofie Boets and Tor-Olav Nævestad
After establishing a common definition of Traffic Safety Culture (TSC), one of the next tasks in the TRUST project was to make an inventory of current interventions and good practices applying a cultural approach to road safety, and to derive success factors and barriers. To explore this at community and organisational level, we consulted experts and reviewed research and practical examples from road safety and other safety critical transport domains and sectors.
The review of community-level TSC interventions indicates that this is an emerging field with an evidence base that is still scarce and fragmented. Few interventions explicitly label themselves as „cultural” and the identified studies vary considerably in target groups, intervention strategies, theoretical approaches, and evaluation designs. This highlights the importance of TRUST to streamline the concept of TSC interventions and to provide guidance on effective ways to build, implement and evaluate them. The proposed fine-tuned concept is that TSC interventions aim at changing, in a relatively short time period, shared ways of thinking/feeling about traffic safety (shared values, norms, beliefs and/or attitudes) that are known to sustainably influence intentional behaviour among members of a bonded group of actors in the road transport system. This differs from interventions directly controlling behaviour (e.g. enforcement, infrastructure, technology), which may also lead to shared mindset changes but rather as an after-effect and indirectly. Common principles are consideration of the underlying social and cultural motives for intentional behaviour, focus on the most salient motives and use of tailored strategies. Recommended mechanisms include changes in shared beliefs “about the social environment”, positive framing and group identification, shared responsibility, and reinforcement through the wider social environment. A structured stepwise frame of success factors was developed.
The evidence base for organisational safety culture (OSC) interventions is considerably more mature, probably because the target group is more well-defined. OSC interventions may influence culture directly through leadership, communication, participation and group interaction, but also indirectly through formal organisational measures such as policies, monitoring, feedback, risk assessments and more comprehensive safety-management systems. Important mechanisms include management signalling and cultural embedding, collective sensemaking and social influence, organisational learning, and institutionalisation through repeated safety-management practices. Successful interventions generally depend on strong management commitment, employee involvement, trust, motivation for change, coherent implementation and sustained organisational attention. The Safety Ladder for safety management (Nævestad et al 2018) illustrates how several of these mechanisms can be combined in a stepwise approach to organisational road-safety management.
More details can be found in TRUST deliverable 2.2c.
photo credit: Ralf Geithe
