Development and validation of a self-report measure of bus driver behaviour

There are likely to be individual differences in bus driver behaviour when adhering to strict schedules under time pressure. A reliable and valid assessment of these individual differences would be useful for bus companies keen to mitigate risk of crash involvement.

This paper reports on three studies to develop and validate a self-report measure of bus driver behaviour. For study one, two principal components analyses of a pilot questionnaire revealed six components describing bus driver behaviour and four bus driver coping components. In study two, test–retest reliability of the components were tested in a sub-sample and found to be adequate. Further, the ten components were used to predict bus crash involvement at three levels of culpability with consistently significant associations found for two components. For study three, avoidance coping was consistently associated with celeration variables in a bus simulator, especially for a time-pressured drive.