Childhood pedestrian injury: a pilot study concerning etiology.

For U.S. children of preschool and school age, fatal pedestrian injury is more common than fatal passenger injury, but there is no agreement on preventive approaches and their efficacy. Development of preventive measures requires understanding of how and why such injuries occur, which in turn requires better methods to sort out the many factors which appear to contribute to the problem. In an attempt to develop the broadest possible picture of the dynamics of child pedestrian injury, a multidisciplinary process was developed to collect and interpret medical, traffic, social, psychological and behavioral information concerning specific injury events. In a pilot study, the process was used to study six pedestrian injuries. The pilot study indicated that: the multidisciplinary approach identified possible etiologic factors missed without it; this approach requires the availability of high quality medical information and police accident records; biological, psychological, and social characteristics of victims, victim families and communities appear to affect the occurrence of child pedestrian injuries; and, such victim factors must be considered in development of countermeasures. It is concluded that the technique of multidisciplinary analysis merits further application as a productive way to generate quantitatively testable hypotheses concerning childhood pedestrian injury causality and potential countermeasures.