Journal of Torbat Heydariyeh University of Medical Sciences

Background:  Every year thousands of people lose their lives in car accidents, in such a manner that Iran is one of the top rank countries in this case. One of the effective factors in this field is attitude of drivers toward safety in driving. The present study aimed to investigate the correlation between safety to attitude and precarious behaviors.

Materials and Methods: The present study is descriptive – analytic. In this study 384 people from interior taxi drivers of Urmia city were selected 192 of whom were considered as the case group with experience of accident during the past three years and 192people as control group with no experience of accident during the past three years. The data were collected through a questionnaire.  The questionnaire includes 3 parts: 1-demographic characteristics 2-safety attitude 3- specialty of personality. To investigate the relationship between personality and attitudes to safety, Features Pearson correlation test was used. For statically analysis SPSS software 16 and Pearson correlation, kruskal- Wallis and Mann- Whitney were used.

Results: Results showed that there was a significant correlation in all three scopes of attitude to safety in drivers, assertiveness scopes, fast driving and dangerous behaviors (p=0.001). There was no significant correlation in all three scopes of attitude to safety and rule breaching and precarious behaviors (p<0.005). Between education level and precarious behaviors no statistically significant relation was found (p<0.005). Also there was no significant correlation between age, marital status, experience of accidents, experience of driving and driving hours per week with the attitude to safety (p>0.05).

Conclusion: Attitude to safety has effects on precarious behaviors of drivers, so by considering the high rate of accident in our country, it is necessary to set up training programs on safety issues for drivers in order to improve the drivers’ attitudes to safety issues.