Item Justification

Appendix D

Question-by-Question Explanation for National Telephone Survey on Distracted Driving Attitudes and Behaviors

Item	Explanation
SC1 – SC1a	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.
SC2	Method for recruiting participants aged 16 and older for the cellular-only sample and screening out lines used exclusively for business.
SC2a	Method for determining probability of selection within household. Will be used for weighting purposes.
SC5-SC7	For sampling purposes, methods for adjusting for unequal selection probability. A respondent that appears on both landline and cell phone sample lists has a greater chance to be called.
SL1-SL1d	Method for recruiting and screening participants from the Landline Sample and excluding out business lines.
SO1-SO1d	Method for recruiting and screening participants aged 16- 34 from the Landline Oversample and excluding out business lines.
SA3	The interviewer at this point will record the gender of the respondent.
Q1	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”).
Q1a-b	These questions identify the respondent’s usual driving vehicle and year model. 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.
Q2-Q2a	These items will assess perceptions of traffic enforcement activity based on time of day.

Item	Explanation
Q3a-Q3j	Knowledge of what devices each participant owns or uses, and what features the vehicle is equipped with, will gauge the particular technologies the participant if familiar with.
Q4a – Q4q	These questions examine the general frequency of potentially distracting behaviors while driving.
Q5-Q5d	These items ask participants to describe where they put their cell phone while driving, identify factors that might influence their decision to answer, and examine how respondents answer their phone and what impact it has on the respondent’s driving performance
Q6b-Q6c	This series of questions examines why respondents chose to initiate calls, and how they typically dial while driving.
Q7-Q7a	This series will gauge the perceived effect that talking on a cellular phone has on the respondent’s driving performance and behavior inside the vehicle.
Q8	This question examines which driving situations respondents would NOT talk on the phone while driving.
Q10-Q10a	This series of questions examines how and when respondents chose to send a text message or an email.
Q11-Q11a	These questions will gauge the perceived effect that sending a text message or an email has on the respondent’s driving performance and behavior inside the vehicle.
Q12	This question examines which driving situations respondents would not send a text message or an email while driving.
Q12a	This item is used to identify smartphone apps which the respondent is likely to use while driving. This will give NHTSA an idea of which apps are used more frequently by drivers while driving.
Q12b-Q12c	This series of questions examines why respondents chose to use a smartphone app while driving and what impact it has on the respondent’s driving.
Q12d-Q12e	These questions will gauge the perceived effect that using a smartphone app has on the respondent’s driving performance and behavior inside the vehicle.
Q12f	This question examines which driving situations respondents would NOT use a smartphone app while driving.
Item	Explanation
Q13	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.
Q14a – Q14r	This series of items measures how safe participants would feel driving next to someone who is engaging in various behaviors that can result in distracted driving. 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.
Q14b1-Q14c1o	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 safe respondents feel when they are a passenger, how likely they are to intervene, and what factors influence whether they would intervene.
Q15-Q15c	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 and education efforts.
Q16-Q16c	This series of questions assesses participants’ awareness of State laws banning hand-held cellular phones and texting and emailing while driving. The question also examines the perceived likelihood of receiving a ticket for violating those laws.
Q17-Q17c	These questions will be used to determine the level of public support for laws that ban talking on a hand-held cell phone and sending texts or emails while driving, and support for fines.
Q18b-Q18c	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-held cellular phone while driving.
Q19-Q20	These items examine whether respondents have been exposed to messages discouraging distracted driving, what they have been exposed to, and from where.
Q21-Q21b	These items concern self-reported history of a crash or near-crash in the past year, as well as whether the driver was distracted at the time.
Item	Explanation
Q22-Q22a	These items gauge participants’ perceptions of the frequency of distracted driving behaviors among other drivers on the road, tapping into the social acceptability of these behaviors.
Q22b	This item asks the respondent to rate the safer method of using a cell phone while driving: hands-free or hand-held. There have been a number of hands-free laws encouraging the use of hands-free devices while driving, however this will assess the public’s perception of safer practices.
Q22c	This item gauges the acceptability of a phone app the driver could install on their phone to block incoming calls and messages while driving.
Q24-Q24k	Standard demographic questions to use for weighting and analyses.