Contextualizing exposures and experiences of behaviors that influence the risk of crash injury in latino adolescent males.

The largest proportion of mortality burden for U.S. Latino adolescent males is attributed to motor vehicle crashes. In a traffic safety context, relatively little is known about how these youth regularly interface within their own culture and how developmental factors as well as behavior choices influence their risk of crash injury. This complex sociobehavioral interface has implications for how this group perceives, interprets, and navigates the adolescent period that is coupled with passenger and driver experiences. We conducted a mixed method study with triangulation design inclusive of in-depth ethnically concordant interviews. Purposive sampling was used to select Latino adolescent males (15-18 years old). Validated measures of acculturation, sensation and reward seeking, and threat avoidance were administered. Using a standard discussion guide with prompts, we explored respondents' perceptions of Latino cultural themes, ideas, attitudes, and experiences regarding passenger and driver safety. Codes were created and defined as concepts emerging from the data in an inductive fashion. Using the constant comparative method, we compared coded text to identify novel themes and expand existing themes until thematic saturation was reached. Despite Latino adolescent males expressing a high value of passenger and driver safety, this did not uniformly manifest in their reports of real-life behaviors. Their experiences reflected a dense frequency of exposure to risky behavior modeling and crash injury risk. Opportunities for Latino youth and family-focused risk reduction skill strategies are plentiful. Further research should explore how culture influences parent perceptions of safety and risk and the extent to which family structure shapes the modeling of risk that their adolescent faces.