Texting while driving behaviour among Ontario youth and young adults

PURPOSE AND OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study is to examine the prevalence, motives and types of TWD behaviour among a sample of Ontario youth and young adults ages 16 to 24. [...] CONCLUSION/IMPLICATIONS The results from the current study suggest that those developing social marketing campaigns targeting TWD among youth and young adults may wish to develop campaigns that: challenge the perception that TWD is the norm (i.e., target group norms) and that reading text messages is safer than sending text messages, highlight the reality of experiencing the consequences of TWD (i [...] According to 2011 census data from Statistics Canada, there were a total of 1,547,690 youth and young adults between 16 and 24 years of age living in Ontario.27 Approximately 51.0 per cent of this population were male and 49.0 per cent were female; about 45.0 per cent of this population were 16 to 19 years of age and 55.0 per cent were 20 to 24 years of age.27 Given this information, nested age an [...] In this way, use of IMBP supports the development of health messages that can address those critical determinants to improve that behaviour in a particular population.40 Additionally, the model can help to develop message content that will maximize the correspondence between the content of the message and a populations’ unique needs.40 See Appendix A for description of the Integrative Model of Beh [...] Objective 2 - To identify the reasons and/or motives for engaging in texting & driving Frequency of TWD for ‘____’ Reason When asked about the frequency of engaging in TWD for a variety of different reasons, the majority of participants indicated that they ‘never’ read text messages while driving for: status updates (82.0 per cent), sports/current events (81.5 per cent), to say hi (79.7 per cent),