The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and State Farm Insurance have released a study that not only shows having another teen in the car is dangerous, they’ve also pin-pointed why.
The study was conducted in two parts. The first found that teens who drive with more than one additional teen consider themselves thrill-seekers, perceive their parent’s rules relaxed or didn’t strongly monitor their activities and had poor knowledge of the dangers of driving.
“The good news is that that these teens make up the minority,” said Jessica Mirman, a researcher and one of the study’s authors. “Teens in this study generally reported strong perceptions of the risks of driving, low frequencies of driving with multiple passengers and strong beliefs that their parents monitored their behavior and set rules.”
The second part of the study looked at males and females who had been involved in a wreck while driving with additional passengers. About 71 percent of males and 47 percent of females said they were distracted directly by the actions of their passengers.
The study also reports that males with passengers were almost six times more likely to violate a traffic law and twice as likely to drive aggressively before a crash, compared to males driving alone, whereas females rarely drove aggressively before an accident, even with other passengers.
The study’s authors encourage parent involvement in prohibiting teen passengers for the first six months of a newly licensed driver and allowing only one passenger for the second six months of driving.
Read more about the dangers of distractions>