Pathways Toward Driver Disqualification and Implications for Road Safety Policy and Practice

Road traffic collisions are preventable events. Those who engage in the most serious forms of road traffic offending are disproportionately responsible for serious injuries and fatalities on the road. Understanding the processes that are implicated in serious road traffic offending can highlight potentially fruitful fulcra for enhancing road safety. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 30 drivers who had been disqualified in the previous 5 years and had regained their driving licenses. Participants were recruited with the support of the national authority for road safety in Ireland (the Road Safety Authority) and self-selected to be interviewed following an extensive recruitment campaign. Transcripts were analyzed using Thematic Analysis. The processes leading to driver disqualification involve a range of interacting factors that include early life experiences, pro-offending cognitions, precipitating stressors and normalization processes. These processes can be usefully synthesized using social ecology models of behavior that focus on the interplay between different personal and contextual factors in determining behavior. Findings suggest that processes leading to disqualification vary widely, pointing to the need for road safety strategies that are sensitive to the complexity of serious road traffic offenses and interventions that have multiple aspects sensitive to the varying processes involved.