American Journal of Preventive Medicine
Adolescent developmentAdolescent Drivers: A Developmental Perspective on Risk, Proficiency, and Safety
Introduction
Driving requires a set of complex, interrelated, and simultaneous competencies, including psychomotor, cognitive, and perceptual proficiency. Although teens are generally successful at acquiring necessary driving skills, translating these skills into safe driving requires complex strategies, expertise, and concentration, with errors in execution often resulting in serious, even fatal, consequences. However, on average, adolescents are not cognitively mature enough to fully execute safe driving skills, with particular risks arising from regulatory challenges that occur in complex and distracting contexts. Given the ongoing development of adolescents' bodies and minds, seen in the context of social influences that occur during adolescence, it is not surprising that adolescent drivers are at such great risk. Reducing risky adolescent driving necessarily requires an understanding of these multiple and often competing demands of development and environment, suggesting that interventions and policies need to respond to these complex systems.
The emerging knowledge of adolescent development has important applications to adolescent driving, providing strong support for the most successful and most promising approaches to enhancing teen driving safety, such as those related to graduated driver licensing (GDL). As discussed later in this article, further understanding of adolescent development should continue the momentum necessary to implement and expand policies that have been shown to be effective. Legislative change requires continuous effort, especially when safety has to compete with custom and convenience, as it so often does.1 Restrictions on teen driving, for example, may on average decrease driving risk, but they also extend the period during which parents need to provide transportation for their adolescent. Further, understanding the underlying mechanisms of adolescent development could provide an impetus for closer study of approaches that have not been systematically tested, as well as some guidance on how such approaches might be more precisely focused.
Section snippets
Adolescent Development: Implications for Teen Driving
Adolescence marks a period of time when rapid and extreme physical, cognitive, and psychosocial changes are occurring. These sets of developmental change are reviewed next, with particular focus on the aspects of development most germane to adolescent driving.
Contextual Influences on Adolescent Development: Implications for Teen Driving
Concurrent with physical, cognitive, psychosocial, and emotional maturation, adolescents are embedded within an ever-changing, multilayered environment. A comprehensive review of the social and cultural environments interacting with and impinging on adolescent development is not feasible here. Instead, a brief overview of the most salient contexts is provided, with particular focus on those aspects most likely to influence teen driving and relevant policies.
Summary: A Comprehensive Perspective
Adolescent development involves a complex set of interrelated systems occurring both within the individual adolescent and between the adolescent and his or her surroundings. Understanding adolescent development and the most important influences on it has the potential to provide key explanations of why and how adolescents may be most at risk for vehicle crashes. Making great strides to reduce teen risky driving will take a similarly comprehensive approach, one that considers not only the
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