COE Team Receives $221,300 Grant to Assess State's Traffic Safety Programs

A team of University of Georgia health promotion and behavior researchers has received a $221,300 grant from the Georgia Governor's Office of Highway Safety (GOHS) to evaluate the effectiveness of the agency's educational programs on traffic safety issues.

The GOHS programs, aimed at reducing crashes, injuries and fatalities on Georgia roadways and nationally known for their effectiveness, include Operation Zero Tolerance, Click-It-or-Ticket, and the recent 100 Days of Summer Heat. The agency is currently focusing on underage and adult drinking and driving prevention; programs to train judges and prosecutors; direct law enforcement; occupant protection and pedestrian safety; older driver and rural roads initiatives; motorcycle safety; and speeding/aggressive driving reduction.

The UGA team, led by College of Education project director Carol Cotton and Stuart Fors, a former professor of health promotion and behavior, will provide evaluation oversight for all of GOHS 2004-05 grants. The primary focus of the project is to systematically review and analyze grantee effectiveness and determine the overall effectiveness of GOHS in managing hundreds of grantees.

Each program must include clearly stated objectives and evaluation criteria to measure their success. In an effort to make these programs more data-driven, GOHS has asked the UGA team to review all of its grants, employing the comprehensive database developed in previous work to organize and evaluate critical data. The system created by the evaluation team includes qualitative and quantitative data and is able to answer both statistical and process questions that require the analysis of field reports.

The UGA team will also evaluate an innovative regional data collection initiative for another large GOHS grantee, the Georgia Traffic Injury Prevention Institute; implementing and evaluating a survey of Georgia driver's knowledge of and attitudes about the new “Steer It and Clear It” law.

Cotton and Fors have extensive experience in implementing and conducting educational program evaluations. They have teamed up on nine previous highway and traffic safety cooperative agreements and grants. This is the fourth grant the researchers have received from the GOHS in the past eight years.

Cotton is known throughout the state for her work in the area of administrative license suspensions, throughout the Southeast for her work as a data contractor with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and across the nation for her co-authorship of the Safe Communities Toolkit.

Fors has an extensive list of publications and is known nationally for his study of the effectiveness of victim impact panels on reducing DUI recidivism. Although he retired in 2003 after 24 years on the UGA faculty, Fors continues to lend his expertise to ongoing projects as principal investigator. Also on the team are Wayland Walker, program analyst, Brook Snoddy and Erin Kirkbride, research assistants.

The UGA team will produce annual comprehensive reports to help GOHS to better meet its mandates by objectively measuring grantee effectiveness and with it, Georgia 's regionally-low crash fatalities and injuries.

Monday, September 20, 2004

WRITER: Wayland Walker, waydwalker@yahoo.com
CONTACT: Carol Cotton, 706/542-2804, ccotton@coe.uga.edu