Adolescent development
Adolescent Drivers: A Developmental Perspective on Risk, Proficiency, and Safety

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2008.06.026Get rights and content

Abstract

Despite considerable improvement in the rates of crashes, injuries, and fatalities among adolescent drivers, attributable in part to effective interventions such as graduated driver licensing, these rates and their associated health risks remain unacceptably high. To understand the sources of risky driving among teens, as well as to identify potential avenues for further advances in prevention, this article presents a review of the relevant features of contemporary research on adolescent development.

Current research offers significant advances in the understanding of the sources of safe driving, proficient driving, and risky driving among adolescents. This multifaceted perspectiveā€”as opposed to simple categorization of good versus bad drivingā€”provides new opportunities for using insights on adolescent development to enhance prevention. Drawing on recent work on adolescent physical, neural, and cognitive development, we argue for approaches to prevention that recognize both the strengths and the limitations of adolescent drivers, with particular attention to the acquisition of expertise, regulatory competence, and self-regulation in the context of perceived risk. This understanding of adolescent development spotlights the provision of appropriate and effective scaffolding, utilizing the contexts of importance to adolescentsā€”parents, peers, and the broader culture of drivingā€”to support safe driving and to manage the inherent risks in learning to do so.

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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