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THE SPEEDING DRIVER: WHO, HOW AND WHY?

CHAPTER SIX DEMOGRAPHICS AND CAR USE

Survey design

6.1 The main objective of this national household survey was to interview a sample of the driving population that was broadly representative of all drivers resident in Scotland. To achieve this the sample was structured as follows:

• The sample was stratified into 11 geographical areas in order to ensure a good geographical spread of interviews.
• Within each of these areas Census enumeration districts were selected with probability proportionate to the number of households with one or more vehicle. This ensured that the selection of sampling points broadly reflected the distribution of car ownership. A total of 125 sampling points were selected. The distribution of sampling points is shown in Appendix D.
• Within each sampling point, quotas were set to guide the selection of respondents. The quotas were based on the age, sex and working status of the population. In addition, potential respondents had to have passed a driving test and have driven in the past 12 months.

6.2 To try to overcome any potential problems of under-reporting, the survey was conducted using computer-assisted personal interviewing. CAPI uses a laptop or handheld computer to record answers rather than pen and paper. The key advantage of CAPI in this context is that because the computer controls the flow of the interview and the delivery of questions, it is possible for respondents to input their own answers to a complex questionnaire. The expectation is that since respondents are inputting data themselves, they might be likely to give more truthful responses than they would be speaking to an interviewer. However, it needs to be borne in mind that speeding is a criminal offence and some degree of under-reporting, although impossible to quantify, seems inevitable.

6.3 Because some people are not always comfortable using computers, the respondent had the option to answer the self-completion exercise themselves or have it conducted as an interviewer-administered survey. Of all respondents, 70% participated in the self-completion section of the questionnaire and a further 28% completed the section with the interviewer's help. Only 2% refused to answer the self-completion section entirely.

6.4 There is interest in the driving behaviour of young adults, both male and female, who, although a relatively small proportion of the driving population, are disproportionately over-represented in accident statistics and in relation to speeding offences. The sampling for the survey therefore sought to boost the number of drivers aged 17-24 years by interviewing any 17-24 year olds identified in households. Thus in households where an older adult was being interviewed, any 17-24 year olds who might also be eligible were recruited.

6.5 This means that 17-24 year olds are over-represented in the sample. This allows for a more detailed analysis of this group than might otherwise have been possible, though in analysis of the whole driving population, this over-representation needs to be accounted for by weighting the data. Similarly, other age groups are under-represented and needed to be weighted.

6.6 The structure of the achieved and weighted sample is shown in Table 6.1.

Table 6.1: Structure of the sample - unweighted and weighted

6.7 Compared with the profile of full licence holders in the Scottish Household Survey (SHS), the respondents in this survey are a close match for the overall driving population (Table 6.2).

Table 6.2: Age of drivers in the survey (weighted)

6.8 The gender balance of the sample is also a close match to the profile of full licence holders in the SHS. Compared with the SHS, which shows that 55% of licence holders are male, this survey has 53% male respondents and 47% female.

6.9 In order to restrict analysis to car drivers, only those respondents who indicated that they drove a car more often than 'Never' (see 'Mode Use' questions, below) are included for all subsequent analyses reported here, giving a useable sample size of 1084 respondents.

DEMOGRAPHICS

Age

6.10 Ages of car driving respondents ranged from 17 to 88. For most comparisons of the effects of age these were recoded into 7 groups as in Table 6.3.

Sex

6.11 Of the 1009 car drivers in the sample who gave their age and gender, 53% were male and 47% female.

Table 6.3: Crosstabulation of age in seven ranges by sex

Household type

6.12 As shown in Table 6.4, majorities of both the males (56%) and females (58%) were from working age couples. Of the single persons of working age with children, four times as many were female (F 12%: M 3%).

Table 6.4: Crosstabulation of household type by sex

Employment

6.13 Around 6 in 10 of the sample (M: 62%; F: 58%) were currently in employment, though the proportion working part-time was much higher for females than for males (F 24%: M 5%).

Table 6.5: Crosstabulation of employment status by sex

Social Class

6.14 Table 6.6 shows the sample of Scottish drivers contained reasonable numbers of males and females of each of the four social class groups.

Table 6.6: Crosstabulation of social class by sex

CAR USE

Mode use

6.15 Respondents were asked 'How often do you use the following types of transport for any kind of journey?'. Table 6.7 gives the distribution of responses. As noted, analysis was restricted to current car drivers, corroborated here by the nil response to 'Never' travelling by car as driver.

6.16 Almost all respondents (97%) drove a car at least once a week. Only 9% of these car drivers said they never travelled by car as a passenger. Over half (57%) used bus and train at least some of the time, 29% of these car drivers took a taxi once a month or more often, 13% cycled monthly or more often, and only 6% of drivers said they never walked 'for at least 10 minutes', with over half (56%) claiming to do so daily. As a recent study for the Scottish Executive of a similar population showed (NFO System Three and Napier University Transport Research Institute, 2001), most Scottish car drivers are multi-modal travellers.

Table 6.7: Frequency of use of different travel modes

6.17 Male and female car drivers did not differ significantly in the frequency with which they drove, nor in the frequency with which they used taxi, bicycle or walking for at least 10 minutes. They did differ, in expected ways, in the frequency with which they used a motorbike (7% of male car drivers and 4% of female car drivers also drove a motorbike at least some of the time). And, as Table 6.8 shows, they differed significantly on chi-squared tests in their use of three other modes. Women travelled more often as a passenger in a car, were more likely to be bus users and to make more frequent use of the bus, and were more likely to be train users.

Table 6.8: Differences between male and female car drivers in frequency of use of travel modes

Car make

6.18 Respondents indicated what make of car they normally drove. There were differences between males and females on only a few makes. Higher proportions of males drove Ford (M 21%: F 16%), Vauxhall (M 15%: F 10%), Skoda (8 males to 3 females) and Saab (4 males to 1 female). Greater proportions of females than males drove Renault (F 10%: M 7%), Peugeot (F 9%: M 7%), Fiat (F 7%: M 4%) and VW (F 6%: M 4%).

Table 6.9: Make of car in 29 groups

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