Application of Behavior Change Theory to the Development

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BEHAVIOR CHANGE THEORY
performance capabilities with high-risk behaviors. The key to developing effective
traffic safety interventions involves an appreciation of the distinction between
performance and behavior (Evans, 1991). Traffic safety researchers are faced with an
intricate problem of devising treatments for drivers who, on the basis of performance
capabilities, should not need them, but on the basis of behaviors, cannot function safely
without them.
In California, the Negligent Operator Treatment and Evaluation System (NOTES),
established in 1985 to replace the Post Licensing Control Reporting and Evaluation
System (1976-1983), was credited with the prevention of 6,000 crashes during its last
four years of operation. The NOTES treatments consist of a warning letter, a notice of
intent to suspend, and a probation hearing, given in sequential order as a driver
accumulates negligent operator points. Overall, the program’s letter treatments were
effective in reducing serious crashes involving injuries and fatalities, as well as those
involving only property damage. In addition, collision reduction was found to be
related to the number of negligent operators treated. Finally, associations between
letter treatments and citations were generally stronger than those for crashes.
With the discontinuation of the NOTES program in 1995, legislative and departmental
decision makers were denied an empirical basis for assessing program effectiveness.
Furthermore, it is known that the effects of treatments change over time, but there is no
system in place to evaluate whether the current treatments remain effectual.
The dual foci of this literature review are driver improvement studies that utilized letter
treatments, and the components of those treatments. The first reason for these specific
emphases is practical, the second financial and the third theoretical. McBride and Peck
(1970) addressed the first consideration when they stated that the advantages of an
effective warning letter over a meeting are obvious when it is recognized that a larger
number of drivers can be contacted more rapidly and easily, and it may be possible to
make a letter as effective as a meeting for improving traffic safety.
Secondly, given limited financial resources, government needs to be mindful of
opportunities for providing improved services at reduced costs. In this spirit,
California’s NOTES program has produced a large and reliable, positive traffic safety
impact through a strategy of mailing inexpensive letter treatments to thousands of
negligent operators. In this way, relatively small effect sizes were magnified into the
statistically significant and cost-effective results reported in this review of the literature.
In addition, as reported by McBride and Peck (1970), the rapid delivery of a letter
intervention has the potential to prevent the need for a more costly meeting between the
negligent-operator and the department.
Finally, for more than 50 years, traffic safety researchers have been studying the results
associated with a variety of treatments and commenting on the elements needed to
create more effective treatments. Adding credence to the accuracy of these early traffic
safety researcher’s intuitive recommendations, a more disciplined research agenda in
transformational psychology was discovering that similar treatment elements to those
identified in traffic safety formed the motivational basis of behavior change in general.
Taken together, these observations form the foundation of a model for behavior change.