Modelling Ghanaian road crash risk using the Manchester driver behaviour questionnaire

Little is known about how well models of driver crash risks from the developed world apply to motoring in African low and middle income countries. The Manchester Driver Behaviour Questionnaire (DBQ; Reason et al., 1990), which distinguishes deliberate violations of accepted safety practices and unintentional errors in its measurement of risky driving has been demonstrated to measure crash liability across a range of cultures. However, its applicability to Africa is currently unknown. The present study examines the psychometric properties of the DBQ in a sample of 453 Ghanaian drivers. A combination of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses produced a 24 item 2-factor model of the DBQ with mainly violation items loading onto one factor and error items loading onto the other. Both violations and errors were independently correlated with self-reported crash involvement and violations correlated with self-reported traffic citations. Higher frequencies of violations and errors were reported by the Ghanaian sample than typically observed in the UK. The findings are consistent with the usefulness of the DBQ in characterising behaviours underlying crash risk in Ghana. The extent to which these risky behaviours may be targeted by behavioural, enforcement and engineering interventions is discussed.