title: Willingness to use safety belt and levels of injury in car accidents.
abstract: In this article, we develop a bivariate ordered Probit model to analyze the decision to fasten the safety belt in a car and the resulting severity of accidents if it happens. The approach takes into account the fact that the decision to fasten the safety belt has a direct causal effect on the category of injury if an accident happens. Our application to a sample drawn from the database of French accident reports in 2003 for three populations of car users (drivers, front passengers, rear passengers) shows that fastening the safety belt is significantly related to a decrease in severe injuries but it shows also that these car users compensate partly for this safety benefit. Furthermore, it is observed that demographic characteristics of car users, as well as transport facilities, play important roles in decisions to fasten safety belts and in the eventual resulting accident injuries.
authors.affiliation: Institut National de Recherche sur les Transports et leur Securite, Departement Economie et Sociologie des Transports, 2, avenue du General Malleret-Joinville, 94114 Arcueil, France. lapparent@inrets.fr
authors.forename: Matthieu
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: de Lapparent
mesh_terms: D000063:Accidents, Traffic / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D001334:Automobile Driving / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D001336:Automobiles / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D019992:Databases as Topic; D005602:France; D015438:Health Behavior; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D018570:Risk Assessment; D012309:Risk-Taking; D012622:Seat Belts / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*