Appendix F-Item Justification for Telephone and Intercept

Appendix F-1

Question-by-Question Explanation for National and

Community-Level Telephone Survey Items

Item	Explanation
LS.1)	Method for recruiting and screening participants from the Landline Sample and excluding out business lines
CS.1)	Method for ensuring that a participant contacted on his or her cellular phone is in a safe place to talk. If the participant is driving or otherwise disposed, interviewer will promptly terminate the call and callback later.
CS.2 - 5)	Method for recruiting participants aged 16 and older for the cellular-only sample and screening out lines used exclusively for business.
CS.6)	For sampling purposes, it is essential to know the general geographic location in which each participant lives. As an individual’s cellular area code may not correspond to his or her primary residence, it is necessary to request a zip code to localize participants. Zip codes alone cannot be used to identify a respondent personally and the phone number dialed will not be stored as part of the data file.
Q.1)	Frequency of driving enables researchers to control for driving exposure and to gauge the actual frequency of certain driving behaviors in subsequent questions that require estimations based on a proportion of driving trips (e.g., “I talk on my phone on about half of my driving trips”).
Q.1.A)	This question identifies the respondent’s usual driving vehicle. It focuses the respondent on a particular type of vehicle when answering. Anchoring later questions to a specific vehicle type is designed to improve the accuracy of the data collection and could impact the types of countermeasures ultimately used to detect and deter distracted driving.
Q.1.B)	Asking about nighttime driving patterns may help identify demographic trends among distracted driving behaviors and ultimately guide program and enforcement activity.
Q.2 - 2.A)	These items will assess perceptions of traffic enforcement activity and, when administered as part of the community-level survey, measure any changes in the perceived frequency of distraction-related traffic enforcement.
Q.3 - 3.H)	Knowledge of what devices each participant owns or uses will gauge the prevalence of particular technologies and enable the interviewer to skip items that concern devices not owned or used by the participant (e.g., a hands-free headset).
LS.2)	This item sorts participants contacted on a landline into the two samples - those that use their landline most often or exclusively and those that use their cellular phone most often. Once interviewers reach the quote for one of the samples this item will screen out those that would have fallen into that sample. We cannot ask this screening question before Q.2 and Q.2.A because we do not want to bias perceptions of enforcement activity by mentioning cellular phones.
Q.4 - 4.A)	These items will quantify the level of familiarity and experience with cellular phones, enabling NHTSA to detect associations between perceived expertise and willingness to engage in distracted driving. Such an association may have implication for future programmatic efforts.
Q.5 - 5.O)	These questions examine the general frequency of potentially distracting behaviors while driving.
Q.6 - 6.A)	These items provide a means by which to assess the relationship between cellular phone exposure (i.e., frequent vs. infrequent users) and distracted driving.
Q.6.B - 8)	This series of questions asks participants to describe how often they are reachable by their cellular phones while driving (as opposed to not bringing it along or having it turned off), whether they feel pressured to be available by cellular phone even while driving, and if so, from who do they feel pressure to be available?
Q.8.A -8.E )	These items assess how likely respondents are to answer an incoming call while driving, identifies factors that might influence their decision to answer, and examines how they answer the phone.
Q.9 - 9.C)	This series of questions assesses how frequently respondents initiate calls, when and why they chose to do so, how they typically dial.
Q.9.D)	The amount of time spent on a typical conversation while driving may be another index by which NHTSA can evaluate the effectiveness of its efforts to reduce distracted driving. It is conceivable that the number of calls placed does not change and yet there is a significant decline in the amount of time actually spent on the phone while driving.
Q.10 - 10.M)	This series will gauge the perceived effect that talking on a cellular phone has on the respondent’s driving performance.
Q.11 - 11.T)	These questions identify environmental, traffic, and personal influences on the decision to talk on a cellular phone while driving.
Q.12)	This item is used to skip those that never use their cellular phone for sending and/or receiving text or email messages (herein referred to as “texting”) past the subsequent items assessing texting behavior.
Q.12.A - 12.C)	These items provide a means by which to assess the relationship between texting exposure (i.e., frequent vs. infrequent users) and distracted driving patterns.
Q.12.D - 13.J)	This series of questions asks participants to describe how often they are reachable by text messages while driving (as opposed to not bringing it along or having it turned off), whether they feel pressured to be available by text message even while driving, and if so, from who do they feel pressure to be available?
Q.14 - 14.A)	These items assess how respondents text while driving and what influences their decision to do so.
Q.15 - 15.M)	This series will gauge the perceived effect that texting has on the respondent’s driving performance.
Q.16)	These questions identify environmental, traffic, and personal influences on the decision to text while driving
Q.17)	This question asks participants to estimate how long a task can direct a driver’s eyes away from the roadway before driving becomes more dangerous. NHTSA is interested in learning whether perceptions are consistent with empirical estimations of a 2 second threshold.
Q.18 - 18.W)	This series of items measures how safe participants would feel driving next to someone who is engaging in various behaviors. Relative differences between items, including filler items that should not be identified as particularly dangerous, will inform NHTSA how dangerous participants believe talking and texting to be.
Q.19 - 19.C)	These items cover self-reported changes in the frequency of talking and texting while driving, as well as the perceived reason(s) for any reported decrease. Although self-reported behavioral changes are not as reliable as naturalistic observations in gauging shifts in distracted driving, it is nonetheless of interest whether participants believe that a change has occurred and whether they attribute that change to increased enforcement efforts.
Q.20 - 21.E)	This series of questions assesses a participants awareness of State laws banning hand-held cellular phones and laptops while driving and the associated fines for violating the laws. The question also assess the perceived likelihood of receiving a ticket for violating those laws and gauges support for the laws and fines.
Q.22 - 22.A)	These items measure whether participants are aware of enforcement efforts focused on distracted driving in their community, and if so, how they heard about those special efforts.
Q.22.B - 22.E)	These questions determine whether participants have had direct contact with law enforcement officers as a result of violating State bans on the use of a hand-help cellular phone while driving.
Q.23 - 24.P)	This series of items examines whether respondents have been exposed to messages discouraging distracted driving, what they have been exposed to and from where, and how important they believe it is to strictly enforce hand-held phone bans. Further, the items measure the perceived change in the frequency of such messages and whether specific slogans and ads have reached drivers.
Q.25 - 25.A)	These two items concern self-reported history of a crash or near-crash in the past year, as well as whether the driver was using a cellular phone at the time.
Q.26 -26.D)	This series of questions assesses exposure to media stories about distracted driving crashes, including the content, source, and influence of the news story.
Q.27 - 30)	These items gauge participants’ perceptions of the frequency of distracted driving behaviors, how those behaviors affect other drivers, and how the participants adjust their own driving if they spot another driver talking or texting on a cellular phone.
Q.31-31.D)	One potential strategy for future messaging is to appeal to passengers, friends, and family members to intervene when someone is engaging in dangerous driving behaviors. This series measures how comfortable respondents are when they are a passenger, how likely they are to intervene, and what factors influence whether they would intervene.
Q.32 - 32.I)	Standard demographic questions.

Appendix F-2

Question-by-Question Explanation for Community-Level Intercept Survey

Items on the intercept survey correspond to the following items, and their above explanation:

Intercept Survey Item Number		Corresponding Telephone Survey Item
1 - 4		Q.32 - 32.I
5		C.S.6
6		Q.1
7		Q.1.A
8 - 9		Q.5 - 5.O
10 - 12		Q.20 - 21.E
13 - 14		Q.22.B - 22.E
15		Q.22 - 22.A
16 - 17		Q.23 - 24.P