Accident proneness theory

An individual whose record, during a given time period, shows reports of repeated violations of laws or regulations. In traffic safety, a habitual violator is usually any driver whose record during a consecutive 12-month period shows reports of more than three convictions for traffic violations or more than five times the average number of convictions for all drivers in the state, whichever is greater. See also Accident Prone Theory. 

Biased liability promotes the view that once an individual becomes involved in an accident, the chances of that same person becoming involved in a future accident increases or decreases when compared to other people. The accident proneness theory promotes the notion that some individuals will simply experience more accidents than others because of some personal tendency. 

Research early focused on the possibility to identify accident-prone drivers, i.e. drivers who due to certain personal characteristics were more likely to be involved in traffic accidents than others. The aim was to improve traffic safety by identifying such individuals, e.g. by use of psychological tests, and excluding them from the traffic environment. Accident statistics showed that some drivers experienced more accidents than others. Although this so-called accident-proneness theory is often accepted as credible by the layman, it has been criticised by the research community for several reasons and is today of little practical significance (McKennan, 1983). The critique may be summarised as follows ... 

One of the origins of this view of error and accident causation is the theory of accident proneness, which tried to show that a small number of individuals were responsible for the majority of accidents. Despite a number of studies that have shown that there is little statistical evidence for this idea (see, e.g., Shaw and Sichel, 1971) the belief remains, particularly in traditional industries, that a relatively small number of individuals accoimt for the majority of accidents. Another element in the emphasis on individual responsibility has been the legal dimension in many major accident investigations, which has often been concerned with attributing blame to individuals from the point of view of determining compensation, rather than in identifying the possible system causes of error. 

A theory of accident proneness that proposes that individuals have incidents due to a lack of alertness brought about by having no choice or freedom in setting or choosing the goals established at work. Where workers have the ability to set and freely pnrsue attainable goals should result in a rich work climate with alertness and fewer incidents, i.e., the workers stay focused and quality improves. 

Attribution theory suggests that there are two main types of explanation for the causes of behaviour. (This is the case whether we are considering safety or any other aspect of behaviour.) The first type of explanation is one that is accepted, almost without question, by the man in the street. It is that a person s behaviour is caused by characteristics such as their personality or their attitudes. Thus accidents are perceived as being caused by peoplebeing accident-prone, foolhardy, negligent, or having a poor safety attitude. In attribution theory terms these explanations are referred... 

The use of human error as a possible cause of accidents is old indeed, one of the early candidates for a theory to explain industrial accidents was a single-factor model of accident proneness put forward in 1919. While accident proneness pointed to humans as potentially unreliable, it did not explicitly describe how an accident happened, i.e., it was a vague assumption rather than a formal model (one reason for that may be that the need for formal accident models in 1910 was rather limited). The first... 

The importance of construct validity. It is possible that a direct relationship between a predictor (such as the measure of accident proneness) and a criterion (such as the number of at-risk behaviors or recordable injuries) can be found (predictive validity) without supporting the underlying principle(s) or theory. This would indicate the absence of construct validity. Suppose, for example, an individual could figure out how to answer the survey questions in order to receive a favorable score. Then, construct validity would be questionable, even if criterion validity were high. 

Accident research during the early part of this century studied the relation between accidents and personal traits of the victim. Accident-proneness was a commonly accepted theory at that time (McKennan, 1983). It stated that certain individuals due to personal traits are more susceptible to accidents than others. It follows from this theory that accident risk may be reduced substantially by removing accident-prone persons from hazardous jobs. Today, accident-proneness is considered to account for only a small part of accidents. It follows that a preventive strategy based on this theory in most cases will have only minor effects. We do not find accident models in use in industry today that focus solely on personal factors. 

Bates, G.E. Neyman, J., Contributions to the theory of accident proneness, I. An optimistic model of the correlation between light and severe accidents, II. True or false contagion. University of California Publications... 

The framework of occupational accident theories has changed over the years. At the beginning of the 20th century a worker was believed to be prone to occupational accidents which meant that certain individuals are always more likely than others to sustain accidents, even though exposed to equal risk (Froggatt Smiley 1964). Such a situation caused that the employer did not feel responsible for providing bad working conditions. 

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