Effects of socio-demographic, personality and mental health factors on traffic violations in Chinese bus drivers

The mediating role of workplace spirituality between personal attributes and job performances of Indian bus drivers

Purpose

Transport industry is one of the leading accident causing industries all around the world. Personal attributes like educational qualification, work experience, marital status, consumption of alcohol, hours of work of bus drivers are known to influence such accidents. In the present study, the mediating effects of Workplace spirituality (WS) among bus drivers between the personal attributes and job performance variables like self-reported accidents, punishments and appraisals are carried out.

Design/methodology/approach

A mediation analysis of WS between personal attributes and job performances of bus drivers is conducted in the present study. Since there is scarcity of studies measuring the effects of WS of bus drivers, new scale to measure WS was developed. The study was carried out in the government-owned road transport corporation in the state of Kerala, India. Responses were obtained from 617 male drivers.

Findings

Using exploratory factor analysis, four factors were identified, namely Meaningful work, Sense of Community, Mindfulness and Compassion. Confirmatory factory analysis provided good fit. The intercorrelations of personal attributes of drivers (independent variables) between WS factors (mediating variables) and job performance variables (dependent variables) were found out. Mediation analysis showed complete mediation of WS factors between marital status, alcohol consumption, hours of work and job performances like number of self-reported accidents, punishments and appraisals. The WS levels of drivers decrease significantly as working hours per goes beyond the legally allowed working hours.

Originality/value

Psychological attributes like Mindfulness, Sense of community, compassion etc. which are collectively known as WS influence the job performances of employees in other industries. Yet it is not studied in the transport industry. Hence, in the present study, the levels of WS are studied among bus drivers of government-owned road transport corporation in the State of Kerala, India.

Association Between Young-Onset Dementia and Risk of Hospitalization for Motor Vehicle Crash Injury in Taiwan

IMPORTANCE

Several studies have suggested that older-onset dementia is associated with an increased risk of motor vehicle crash injury (MVCI). However, evidence of an association between young-onset dementia and the risk of MVCI is insufficient, particularly in Asia.

OBJECTIVE

To investigate the association between young-onset dementia and MVCI-related hospitalization in Taiwan.

DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS

In this nationwide, population-based cohort study in Taiwan, a cohort of 39 344 patients aged 40 to 64 years with incident dementia diagnosed between 2006 and 2012 was matched 1:1 with a cohort of participants without dementia by age, sex, and index year (initial diagnosis of dementia). Participants were identified from Taiwan's National Health Insurance Research Database (NHIRD). Data were analyzed between March 25 and October 22, 2021.

EXPOSURES

Dementia, defined by International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification codes.

MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES

Hospitalization for MVCI, determined using linked data from Taiwan's Police-Reported Traffic Accident Registry and the NHIRD from January 1, 2003, to December 31, 2015. Hazard ratios (HRs) for MVCI-related hospitalization were estimated using Cox proportional hazards regression models adjusted for sex, age, salary-based insurance premium, urbanization level, and comorbidities.

RESULTS

Of the 78 688 participants, 47 034 (59.8%) were male; the mean (SD) age was 54.5 (7.4) years. During the 10-year follow-up period, the incidence density of MVCI-related hospitalization was 45.58 per 10 000 person-years (95% CI, 42.77-48.39 per 10 000 person-years) among participants with dementia and 24.10 per 10 000 person-years (95% CI, 22.22-25.99 per 10 000 person-years) among participants without dementia. Compared with participants without dementia, patients with young-onset dementia were at higher risk of MVCI-related hospitalization (adjusted HR [aHR], 1.83; 95% CI, 1.63-2.06), especially those in younger age groups (aged 40-44 years: aHR, 3.54; 95% CI, 2.48-5.07) and within a shorter period (within 1 year of follow-up: aHR, 3.53; 95% CI, 2.50-4.98) after dementia was diagnosed. Patients with young-onset dementia also had a higher risk of being a pedestrian when the crash occurred (aHR, 2.89; 95% CI, 2.04-4.11), having an intracranial or internal injury (aHR, 2.44; 95% CI, 2.02-2.94), and having a severe injury (aHR, 2.90; 95% CI, 2.16-3.89).

CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE

In this retrospective cohort study, patients in Taiwan with a diagnosis of young-onset dementia had a higher risk of MVCI-related hospitalization than did individuals without dementia and the risk varied by age, disease duration, transport mode, injury type, and injury severity. These findings suggest a need for the planning of strategies to prevent transportation crashes among patients with young-onset dementia.

Association between psychological symptoms and illegal driving behaviors in a sample of Chinese private car drivers

BACKGROUND

Findings on the associations between psychological symptoms and driving behaviors in private car drivers are inadequate.

METHOD

The study consisted of 3,115 private car drivers in Yulin, China. The measurements included socio-demographic data, traffic violations, accidents, and Symptom Checklist-90 (SCL-90). In addition, an ordered logistic regression model was employed to examine the association between each psychological symptom and risky driving behaviors.

RESULTS

The overall prevalence rate of any self-reported psychological symptom was 10.24%, with 9.22% for males and 11.49% for females. Among them, obsessive-compulsive, interpersonal sensitivity, additional items, hostility, and depression were the five most common psychological symptoms, with prevalence rates of 7.90, 6.29, 6.00, 5.91, and 5.62%, respectively. Any psychological symptom factor was associated with a higher risk of traffic violations and accidents. However, the intensity of the correlations varied, with obsessive-compulsive symptoms the strongest in general traffic violations and anxiety symptoms in traffic accidents. All psychological symptoms except phobic anxiety and paranoid ideation contributed to a higher risk of failing the driver's license test.

CONCLUSIONS

The prevalence rate of psychological symptoms was high in private car drivers. This study calls for an urgent need to establish a pilot tertiary prevention strategy to reduce risky driving behaviors through psychological symptom screening and interventions among private car drivers.

Linking Human And Machine Behavior: A New Approach to Evaluate Training Data Quality for Beneficial Machine Learning

Machine behavior that is based on learning algorithms can be significantly influenced by the exposure to data of different qualities. Up to now, those qualities are solely measured in technical terms, but not in ethical ones, despite the significant role of training and annotation data in supervised machine learning. This is the first study to fill this gap by describing new dimensions of data quality for supervised machine learning applications. Based on the rationale that different social and psychological backgrounds of individuals correlate in practice with different modes of human–computer-interaction, the paper describes from an ethical perspective how varying qualities of behavioral data that individuals leave behind while using digital technologies have socially relevant ramification for the development of machine learning applications. The specific objective of this study is to describe how training data can be selected according to ethical assessments of the behavior it originates from, establishing an innovative filter regime to transition from the big data rationale n = all to a more selective way of processing data for training sets in machine learning. The overarching aim of this research is to promote methods for achieving beneficial machine learning applications that could be widely useful for industry as well as academia.

The association between demographic characteristics, personality, and mental health of bus drivers in China: A structural equation model

BACKGROUND

The psychological status of drivers is related to adverse driving behaviors. Although there are several studies on the mental health and traffic accidents among bus drivers, related studies on the association between mental health and individual characteristics are scarce.

METHODS

Our report is on a cross-sectional study of bus drivers that took place between October 2014 and May 2016. A total of 596 bus drivers who worked for transportation companies and underwent occupational physical examinations at The Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region workers' Hospital during the study period were included. Demographic characteristics were collected by a self-designed demographic questionnaire. The Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) and the Symptom Checklist 90-Revised (SCL-90-R) were used to evaluate the personality and mental health of bus drivers, and the results of the scales were compared with Chinese norms. The structural equation model was used to analyze the correlation among demographic characteristics, personality characteristics, and mental health.

RESULTS

Except for the lie dimension, the average scores of the driver's personality dimension were higher than the Chinese norm, and the means of somatization and phobia scores of bus drivers were also higher; obsessions-compulsions, interpersonal sensitivity, and depression scores were lower than those for the Chinese norms. The structural equations modeling revealed that the total effects coefficient of demographic characteristics on mental health was 0.68, and that of personality was 0.60. There were direct influences between demographic characteristics and personality characteristics, demographic characteristics and mental health, and personality characteristics and mental health; the standardized path coefficients were 0.60, 0.50, and 0.30, respectively. Smoking, drinking, and neuroticism were the main factors affecting the mental health of bus drivers; and the standardized path coefficients were 0.56, 0.54, and 0.90 respectively.

CONCLUSIONS

In this study, bus drivers were significantly more extroverted, psychotic, and neurotic than the general population; and they were more likely to suffer from somatization and phobia. The mental health of bus drivers was associated with some demographic and personality characteristics in the study. These findings provide a theoretical basis for the selection of bus drivers and intervention measures for drivers with high-risk driving tendencies, which is conducive to better guide road traffic safety construction and reduce the occurrence of road traffic injuries.