PY1998: Survey by Southampton University to understand how drivers interact with each other on the road
This survey is part of a PhD project at the University of Southampton that looks to understand how drivers interact with each other on the road, understanding what environmental and driver factors affect these interactions.
At the moment, they don’t have much representation from HGV drivers, which would be great to have!
The survey should take between 15 and 20 minutes to complete!
Here’s a link to the survey if you want to check it out:
Can I ask whether there has been much response?
I often overlook the items at the top of the board. Maybe I shouldnt but there we go. Would a post in the main body "advertising" this survey be useful? Any off topic rubbish (just imagine that!) could be safely isolated there, or removed to Bullys if necessary.
I’m doing this on a phone so had to wade through tons of frankly irrelevant gubbins which I know you have to include, but each section should be a link and on clicking it expands / contracts.
Then it took me ages to actually find where the survey starts and it was only because I zoomed in that I finally found the link and tiny “tick this box to agree to the above”.
So before I start the survey, I’ve almost given up which might be why its got very few responses. So give your IT dept a kicking as this comes under user accessibility and they got a F- grade for what should be a 5 minute JavaScript job (and I’ve not touched that stuff in 5 years).
Taken the survey now. One thing which stood out was a number of apparent contradictions on the questions where you get a diagram and then next but was multiple choice.
It states on the initial question tjjngs like “you are in a good mood” and then tje first multiple choice is for “you are in a bad mood”. Same for leisurely drive, then it asks for “in a rush”.
There was also one about two wide roads then one road is narrower, and a 3 lane motorway with a question about the same being a 2 lane motorway.
Not sure if those were supposed to be “the scenario has now changed to X so think about the situation in this context”. It might have been better to split the question into the original version, then a second "scenario has now changed’ version to compare responses.
Also not sure if we’re supposed to answer this generally or when driving an HGV / bus? There might be different responses like would you let someone else come through might depend on space available and whether you’re heavily loaded.
Its also quite hard to match response to those radio buttons but there’s not much you can do about that.
Franglais:
Can I ask whether there has been much response?
I often overlook the items at the top of the board. Maybe I shouldnt but there we go. Would a post in the main body "advertising" this survey be useful? Any off topic rubbish (just imagine that!) could be safely isolated there, or removed to Bullys if necessary.
Hi there (and sorry for the late reply)!
I have actually had a lot of responses, including from HGV drivers, which has been amazing! So a massive thank you to everyone that has engaged from this forum because this study has now got representation from a range of different groups of drivers!
On the layout and the format of the questions, first, thank you for completing the survey!
Unfortunately, the website that we use for surveys at the University of Southampton is old and isn’t mobile-friendly. I didn’t realise this until I got responses from people saying that it is difficult to navigate on a phone. When reviewing the survey before publicising it, I didn’t think to look at what it would look like on a phone, because I assumed it would be mobile-friendly (I won’t make that mistake again!)
In terms of the questions I have included and the apparent contradictions, I designed it to see whether a specific factor in isolation would change how someone would interact with someone else on the road. I had to paint the picture of creating a baseline scenario so that all other factors that could have an effect were taken into account so that I could attribute the change in answer to that one factor.
With the ranking question I wanted to see whether the type of vehicle influenced decision-making. For example, I have seen that buses tend to let other buses pass through a crossroad/roundabout first, even in circumstances where they shouldn’t according to traffic law. But yes, I do understand that ranking vehicles in order is annoying especially if it might not change, or does not affect your decision-making. In hindsight, I would have changed that before publicising the survey!
I’d just like to say a massive thank you to everyone that has contributed and to the community here in general! I’ve now closed the survey for any more responses and the long process of analysing the data has begun! I hope that the findings of this study will end up being published in a research journal at some point in the future, but I know that it will be an incredibly useful first step in properly defining where my PhD project goes regardless!
Again, thank you to everyone, and I hope everyone is keeping safe!!
This survey has been approved by Admin. dd.