Risk Attitude, Perception, Behavior and Personality as Indicators of a Driver’s Risk Awareness in China

As the driver is the information recipient and primary decision maker in the driving process, this research aims to investigate a driver's risk awareness to assess a driver's safety. We developed a scale for assessing a driver's risk awareness, which consists of four scales: Risk Attitude (48 items), Risk Perception (22 items) and Risk Behavior (27 items) scale, and the Sensation Seeking Scale (SSS) (14 items). The first three scales together cover 14 indicators, and the same 14 indicators are dealt with in the sensation seeking scale. The 14 indicators are named second class indices, such as the general attitude towards obeying rules, aggressive violations and awareness of safe driving, etc. In this study, in order to develop a risk awareness model, a survey was conducted in China. Based on the survey, exploratory factor analysis of the scale revealed three risk awareness factors (risk attitude, risk perception and risk behavior), also named first class indices. The respective weights of the 14 second class indices and the 3 first class indices were calculated. Results of statistically analyzing the survey showed that some drivers in our study have a high risk awareness. In addition, a diagram was constructed based on the regression analysis of a driver's sensation seeking and risk awareness indices. It appeared that the higher the driver's SSS, the lower the driver's risk awareness.