Health Education Research, Vol. 18, No. 4, 493-505,
August 2003
© 2003 Oxford University Press
Tackling children’s road safety through edutainment: an evaluation of effectiveness
Department of Psychology, University of Dundee, Dundee DD1 4HN and 1 Tayside Police, Police Headquarters, Dundee DD1 9JU, UK. e-mail: m.s.zeedyk{at}dundee.ac.uk
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Abstract |
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The burgeoning market in electronic media has encouraged a trend toward ‘edutainment’, where entertaining, media-based materials are used to facilitate educational outcomes. In this study, we evaluated the effectiveness of a video that has recently been released by a popular children’s entertainment group to help tackle Britain’s poor record on children’s road safety. We wished to determine whether the video had an impact on either children’s knowledge or parents’ awareness of pedestrian skills, when used in a standard home-based fashion. A total of 120 families participated, all of whom had children 5 years of age. Half the families received videos at the beginning of the study, while the other half served as a control group against which to measure change in the treatment group. Data were gathered at baseline and again 1 month later, using a series of tailored questionnaire items. A robust pattern of null findings indicated that the video, when used in this casual fashion, had no educational impact on either parents or children. Crucially, however, parents strongly believed that it had. The discussion explores the implications of such a mismatch and highlights similarities with outcomes of other health education interventions.
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Introduction |
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Road safety remains one of the most serious health risks facing children in Britain and other developed countries. In the year 2000, more than 5000 child pedestrians were killed or seriously injured on British roads, with an additional 35 000 incurring slight injuries (Road Accidents Great Britain, 2001
). While this constitutes an encouraging decrease from casualty rates in previous years, Britain’s record remains one of the poorest in Europe. It is surprising, therefore, that the health education literature has not given more attention to this issue. Much of the existing literature on children’s road safety resides in journals focused on accident analysis, public health or medicine. However, the many initiatives that have been developed to improve children’s pedestrian skills (e.g. Green Cross Code, Tufty Club, Walkwise, Children’s Traffic Club) represent good examples of health promotion activities.
The purpose of the study reported in this paper was to assess the effectiveness of a novel approach toward tackling this problem: edutainment. We examined the educational impact of a recently released, entertaining children’s video that is described on its packaging as finding ‘fun ways to teach children valuable lessons about taking care on the road’. Such a description accords closely with the definition given for the increasingly popular approach to learning that has been dubbed ‘edutainment’: ‘The act of learning through a medium, particularly media-based, that both educates and entertains’ (American Heritage Dictionary, 2000). We were particularly interested in gathering evidence in regard to two questions:
Does standard home viewing of the video cause young children’s knowledge about road safety to improve? Does the video have any effect on parents’ attitudes toward children’s road safety?
The video of interest was released in 1997 by the Scottish-based children’s entertainment group ‘The Singing Kettle’, under the title The Busy Road Show. Having been established nearly two decades ago, The Singing Kettle has gained huge popularity with families throughout Scotland. The shows, composed of lively songs, rhymes and humorous skits, are billed as family entertainment, directed toward children in the age range 3–8 years. The group performs over 200 live shows each year, at venues throughout Scotland and the UK, and their television series with ITV and BBC are estimated to attract 200 000 families per show (www.singingkettle.com). The group markets a wide range of merchandise, including 15 videos, with some of the ‘classic videos’ having now sold in excess of 350 000 copies. They have received a number of awards related to their services to children’s entertainment, including the Prince Michael of Kent Award for Road Safety. The purpose of their shows has traditionally been entertainment, in that they have focused on topics such as circuses, pirates and jungles, but the group’s recent release of videos on tooth-brushing, fitness and road safety takes them into more health-based domains. The songs in The Busy Road Show are designed to reinforce basic road safety messages, such as reminding children to walk on the pavement, to seek the assistance of an adult when crossing the road, and to look and listen before crossing. The 67-min video records one of the live stage performances, with film clips of audience members interspersed to communicate the excitement of the event. In summary, the immense popularity of The Singing Kettle merchandise with young Scottish families makes it possible that the video could serve as a widely accessible road safety teaching aid. The video’s packaging suggests that the producers hope it will be beneficial in that regard and the Scottish Road Safety Campaign has given their endorsement to the project.
Road safety initiatives have tended to focus on children’s pedestrian skills, trying to improve their relevant knowledge and behavior [for a review, see (Thomson et al., 1996)]. The educational capacity of this video fits that framework. Parents may also benefit from the video. It has been demonstrated that the kind of training a parent provides has an impact on their children’s pedestrian skills (Limbourg and Gerber, 1981; Rothengatter, 1981; Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, 2000). Parents are often unsure how best to teach their children about road safety, however, and may over-estimate children’s skills (Sadler, 1972; Zeedyk et al., 1997). Thus, they can benefit from initiatives to raise their awareness [e.g. (Bryan-Brown and Harland, 1999; Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, 2000)] and The Singing Kettle video has the potential to perform this role, especially if children and parents are watching the video together. For these reasons, both children’s knowledge and parents’ awareness were evaluated in this research project. We assessed these two factors by distributing videos to a group of families and then comparing their responses, on a set of tailored questionnaire items, to the responses of families in a control condition (who had not received copies of the video). Data were gathered at baseline and again one month later.
Primary 1 children (5 years old) were chosen as the focus for the study because recommendations continue to be made that children within this age range should be educated about road safety [e.g. (Ivett, 2001; Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions, 2002)]. Whitebread and Neilson [(Whitebread and Neilson, 1999), p. 405], for example, argue that children’s road-safety education should begin ‘as soon as children start school’, while the Traffic Club initiative (Bryan-Brown and Harland, 1999) encourages parents to carry out training from the age of 1 year. Research has confirmed that the skills of children in this age group can be improved with training [e.g. (Firth, 1973; Thomson et al., 1992; Ampofo-Boateng et al., 1993)]. For example, Thomson and Whelan (Thomson and Whelan, 1997) have been able to show that young children’s abilities to perform complex tasks, including crossing between parked cars and near intersections, can be significantly improved and sustained with only four behavioural training sessions. Zeedyk et al. (Zeedyk et al., 2001) found that a single, intensive, classroom-based lesson increased children’s knowledge about safe and dangerous crossing sites, and that that outcome was maintained for a 6-month period. Thus, focusing on Primary 1 children makes both empirical and practical sense, given that this age group constitutes a large proportion of the target audience of The Singing Kettle productions.
It should be made explicit that the aim of the study was not to determine the most effective way to use The Singing Kettle video as a teaching tool. The aim was to establish whether it has any effect, on children or parents, when used in a standard way within a household. If the findings of the study indicate that children’s knowledge or parents’ awareness improves, then the video should be widely promoted as an effective educational tool. If the findings indicate, conversely, that ordinary viewing is not effective in producing a change, this information is also valuable, for it helps users to treat it as entertainment. Too often it has been taken on trust that novel road safety materials are to be welcomed, with little evaluative evidence being produced by which to judge their effectiveness (Grayson, 1981).
It should also be emphasized that this study only investigated knowledge and awareness. It did not assess behaviour. Because assessing behaviour presents methodological challenges, research studies have tended to focus on constructs that are more easily measured, including knowledge and attitudes [for a review, see (Thomson et al., 1996)]. Yet it has been robustly demonstrated that such factors do not automatically transfer to behaviour, not only in the road safety domain (Rothengatter, 1981; Ampofo-Boateng and Thomson, 1990; Zeedyk et al., 2001), but also in other health-related domains, such as smoking (Reid, 1985) and alcohol use (Wallack and Barrows, 1983). Thus, we would regard behavioural observations as valuable for a fuller evaluation of the video’s impact. The evidence produced by this initial study was regarded as useful in determining whether such a study should be undertaken.
Our hypothesis was that, if the video serves an effective educational function, viewing it on an ordinary basis would increase (1) children’s knowledge about road safety and/or (2) parents’ awareness of child pedestrian issues. Children’s knowledge was assessed through individually administered questions relating to the topics covered in the video’s songs and we expected the knowledge of children in the treatment group to increase while those in the control group stayed static. Parents’ awareness was assessed by completing questionnaires examining their views about children’s road safety, both in general and in relation to their own child. Given the exploratory nature of the project, it was difficult to predict precisely how the video might influence parents’ views; while increasing awareness could cause them to rate children’s skills more poorly, it could also lead them to provide more training and thus to perceive their children’s skills as having increasing by the end of the study. Thus, we simply hoped to find different trajectories for the parents’ treatment and control groups, with no expectations about the direction of that change.
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Methods |
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Participants
Invitations were sent to parents of Primary 1 children at five local primary schools. The first 120 parents who responded to the invitation were accepted as participants in the study. The final sample comprised 62 girls and 58 boys, all of whom were in the 5-year age range, and their parents. Half the sample (49%) reported travelling to school by car or bus, while the remainder reporting walking. Two families already had a copy of the video in their home and their data were discarded from the dataset. Thirty-five percent of the sample reported owning at least one other video from The Singing Kettle series.
Video viewing practices
In order to determine ‘standard’ viewing practices of the participating families, we asked a subsample of the treatment group (33%) to submit structured weekly diaries about their viewing patterns. These data indicated that the video was viewed between zero and three times per day, the modal response being once per day. It was most often a child’s idea, rather than an adult’s, to put on the video (72% of cases). The video was almost always watched in company, which was reported to include other children in 91% of cases and adults in 81% of cases. All of these patterns remained stable across the month. Fuller details about families’ viewing practices can be obtained from the authors (Zeedyk and Wallace, unpublished).
Measures
Children
Evaluation of children’s knowledge about road safety was conducted by asking them a series of nine questions, each of which related directly to one of the songs on the video. The questions are shown in Table I, where it can be seen that three different formats were employed across the set of questions, in order to hold children’s attention. Children’s responses were coded in relation to the information contained in the songs, as described in Results. This relational coding scheme was adopted because it provided the most precise way of determining whether children were using information gained from the video.
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Parents
Evaluation of parents’ awareness of road safety issues was conducted by examining three different areas: (1) parents’ general views on road safety, (2) their perceptions of their Primary 1 child’s road safety skills and (3) the training they typically provide for their child. Parents were asked to complete a series of questions relating to each category. Responses to most questions were obtained via rating scales; these were always positively oriented (i.e. higher values represented greater frequency or a more optimistic endorsement). Items pertaining to parents’ general views on road safety were as follows:
(1) Which one of the following statements do you most agree with? (a) Young children should be kept away from roads and traffic to ensure their safety. (b) Young children need to be exposed to roads and traffic to learn about their dangers.
(2) How strongly do you agree with the statement you chose in Question 1? (Four-point scale, from mildly to strongly agree.)
(3) How important do you think it is to educate Primary 1 children about road safety? (Four-point scale, from not at all to extremely important.)
(4) Do you allow your Primary 1 child to cross quiet roads on his/her own? If no, please state the age at which you think you would allow them to do this.
Questions pertaining to the latter two areas investigated (i.e. perceptions of child’s skills and parental training) are shown in Tables III and IV.
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At the end of the study, parents in the treatment condition were asked to complete one further set of questions, concerning their perceptions of the video. The items asked how much they thought (1) their child had learned, (2) the video had affected their child’s behaviour, (3) the video would be effective in teaching young children about road safety and (4) the video had made them, as parents, think about their child’s safety on the road. A five-point response scale was used for each item.
Procedure
A pre-test–post-test design was employed, with a 1-month gap between the two test sessions. Participants were randomly assigned to either the treatment or control condition. Those in the treatment condition (N = 60) received the video at the beginning of the study, while those in the control condition (N = 60) did not receive their video until the end. The same questions were used in both conditions and at both test sessions.
Children were tested in school settings during school hours; they were allowed out of class long enough to complete the tasks. Researchers worked with each child individually in a quiet room, asking the nine questions listed above and recording the answers that the children gave on a prepared coding sheet. The procedure took approximately 5 min for each child, and children appeared engaged and interested throughout the tasks.
Parents completed their questionnaires in either their child’s school (30% of sample) or at home. Parents who completed the questionnaire at home were provided with a stamped envelope in which to return completed materials by post. Parents were prompted by telephone if they had not returned the questionnaire within 1 week. Videos were dispatched after completion of the relevant questionnaire; this helped to provide inducement to return the questionnaires. Return rates for parental pre-test materials were 99 and 68% for the treatment and control groups, respectively, and 91 and 83% at post-test. It was generally mothers who completed the questionnaires (90%), the remaining portion being completed by fathers or other caretakers.
Design
For continuous data, analysis was conducted with a 2 x 2 mixed ANOVA (group x test session). For categorical data, Wilcoxon matched pairs tests were used to compare pre- and post-test sessions, with separate tests carried out for the treatment and control groups. We were interested in changes on individual items, rather than global change. Thus, comparisons were conducted for each item, rather than multivariate analyses. Because this entailed a large number of comparisons, an 
level of 0.01 was adopted as the criterion for statistical significance. Within each section below, the pattern emerging at pre-test will first be described, followed by a discussion of evidence that indicates whether or not a change took place by the point of post-testing. Full statistical statements will only be provided for outcomes that achieved statistical significance, in order to facilitate brevity.
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Results |
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Children’s measures
Some children were absent at the time of testing, bringing the final sample sizes for treatment and control groups, respectively, to 59 and 56 (at pre-test) and 54 and 55 (at post-test). Data for children’s responses are provided in Table II.
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Item 1: ‘Helping hands’ to cross the road
This item was investigated from two different perspectives. The first asked whether there was an increase in the total number of people that children were able to name as a result of the video. At pre-test, children could think of only a few people at pre-test (treatment M = 2.81; control M = 2.83) and these means remained virtually unchanged at post-test (treatment M = 2.85; control M = 2.62), as confirmed by an ANOVA. The second question asked whether there were increases for any of the specific categories of people featured in the video. This was investigated by looking at each category the children could have named. The song in the video identifies six people who might assist a child in crossing the road. The percentage of children who named each of these people at pre-test and at post-test was calculated, and figures are shown in Table II. Parents and crossing guards were the individuals most often identified. Wilcoxon tests confirmed that there were no significant effects for time or group. Thus, the video was not successful in increasing the range of people that children could think of who might help them to cross the road.
Item 2: Safe places to play
As with Item 1, we asked (1) whether the total number of safe places that children could name increased as a result of the video and (2) whether there were increases in any of the places featured in the video. In regard to total number of places identified, children in both groups usually named less than three places (treatment M = 2.30; control M = 2.58), with no significant change over time (treatment M = 2.32; control M = 2.08), as confirmed by an ANOVA. Data in Table II show that there was a reasonable spread across the specific place categories named, although there was no significant increase produced as a result of the video.
Item 3: Holding hands with parents
When asked if children should hold hands with a parent when crossing the road, children always said ‘yes’, bar one child who answered ‘no’ during post-testing. Thus, children clearly know ‘the correct’ answer for this question. When asked why this was the case, children were slightly less certain. At pre-test, 85% of children were able to give a reason that was relevant to road safety (e.g. ‘because it makes the cars stop’). The remainder spoke of other reasons (e.g. ‘so strangers can’t steal you’). At post-test, fewer children (78%) were able to articulate why they should hold hands with a parent. Wilcoxon tests confirmed that there was no significant effect of time for either group, as shown in Table II. Children clearly knew that it was best to hold a parent’s hand when crossing the road, but the video was not effective in helping them to better understand why.
Item 4: Consequences of running across road without looking
When children were asked what they thought about the little boy in the story who ran into the road without looking, a majority (74%) responded that they thought ‘he had probably been run over’. Some embellished their conclusions by describing the bloody surgery he would have to undergo when he was taken to hospital. However, as data in Table II illustrate, and Wilcoxon tests confirmed, there was no significant change in response patterns over time. These findings suggest that children realized that crossing without looking could be dangerous and that this knowledge had been acquired independently of the video.
Item 5: Actions before crossing a road (i.e. stop, look, listen and think)
At pre-test, children could not generally remember even two of the four classic pre-crossing steps (treatment M = 1.58; control M = 1.81) and an ANOVA confirmed that this had not changed significantly by post-test (treatment M = 1.81; control M = 1.64). Table II demonstrates that looking was the step recalled most often; memory for the other three steps was noticeably poorer. Wilcoxon tests indicated that there no significant improvement for any category, suggesting that the video songs did not improve children’s memory of the steps they should take before crossing a road.
Items 6–8: Recognizing the red man, green man and traffic island
Each of these items pertains to a device designed to assist in crossing the street. The questions asked were intended to determine whether children understood the function of each. The percentage of children who could correctly describe the function of each is shown in Table II. These figures suggest that, even at pre-test, the function of the ‘red man’ and ‘green man’ is familiar to children. Knowledge about the traffic island is higher than might have been predicted. However, findings from Wilcoxon tests suggest that the video did not effect further improvement of children’s understanding of these devices.
Item 9: Pavements as safe places to stand
This item was designed to determine whether children are able to discriminate between safe and unsafe places to stand at the roadside, which is the topic of the final song on the video. When asked which of the two people in the photograph was standing in the safe place, the majority (84%) pointed correctly to the man on the pavement (sidewalk). When probed further as to why they had selected him, most could also articulate that it was because he was standing on the pavement. Indeed, it became apparent that a few children had not chosen him because they did not believe he was standing far enough back on the pavement to be ‘really’ safe. Wilcoxon tests indicated that a significant increase occurred within the treatment group’s responses for the ‘who’ item (Z = 2.61, P = 0.009) and a significant increase for the control group’s responses to the ‘why’ item (Z = 3.14, P = 0.001). Given the inconsistency of this pattern, it is likely to be a consequence of chance. It cannot be reasonably concluded that the video influenced children’s understanding of where they should stand on the road; this is likely to have come from other sources.
Parents’ measures
A proportion of parents failed to return questionnaires, bringing the final sample sizes for treatment and control groups, respectively, to 59 and 41 (at pre-test) and 54 and 49 (at post-test). Data for parents’ responses are shown in Tables III and IV.
Parents’ general views on road safety
Parents generally felt that educating children about road safety was very important. At pre-test, 97% chose the option ‘extremely important’ and 98% did so at post-test. They also adopted a fairly liberal approach to roadside independence. One-third of the sample (32%) said they currently allowed their Primary 1 child to cross quiet roads on his/her own and another 19% said they would do so by 7 years of age. The figures at post-test showed no significant change (54% allowing this by age 7), as confirmed by a Wilcoxon test. Thus, half the parents in this sample deemed children mature enough to cross quiet roads on their own by the age of 7 and this was a view that did not differ between the two groups nor change over the period of the study.
Parents’ overarching perspective on road safety training provides some context for these previous two sets of findings. When asked, at pre-test, whether they thought children were best exposed to or protected from traffic, the majority of parents (76%) endorsed the view that young children need to be exposed to roads in order to learn about traffic dangers. Only 24% of parents felt that it was more important to keep young children away from roads and traffic. Interestingly, parents felt strongly about whichever view they endorsed. When asked how strongly they agreed with the statement they had chosen, a mean of 3.43 (SD = 0.70) (out of a possible 4.0) was obtained for the group advocating exposure and a mean of 3.42 (SD = 0.64) for the group advocating protection. Parents felt strongly that children should either be exposed or kept away from traffic; their views were not tenuous.
When asked about their views again at post-test, a total of 12 parents had changed their minds: four toward a more lenient view and eight toward a more restricted view. This shift did not achieve statistical significance, however, as confirmed by a Wilcoxon test. Moreover, the shifts that did occur were not due to the video, as equal numbers of parents in both groups changed in their minds in the same directions. There was also no significant change by post-test in the degree to which parents supported either position [exposure: M = 3.51; protection: M = 3.13), as confirmed by t-tests.
Overall, these findings show that parents have strong views on the road safety training of their children and that they also tend to allow a high level of pedestrian independence for their children. The video does not appear to influence these views to any notable extent.
Parents’ views of their child’s road safety skills
Pre-test assessment showed that parents rated their children’s skills as at least adequate on most of the items tested. As shown in Table III, mean scores for the treatment and control groups were typically between 3.0 and 4.0 (out of a possible total of 5). Children’s understanding of the green man emerged as the strongest skill and crossing main roads alone as the weakest skill. There was no change between pre- and post-testing for any item, as confirmed by a series of ANOVAs, suggesting that the video did not have an impact on parents’ assessment of their own child’s skills.
Parents’ provision of road safety training
Table IV shows how often parents (report that they) engage in road safety training with their child. These figures show that parents perceived themselves to be attentive and consistent in their use of road safety training activities. A series of ANOVAs confirmed there was no significant change between pre- and post-test in their performance, suggesting that the video had no impact on their approach to training. Notably, it would have been hard for scores to increase, as parents’ self-ratings at pre-test were near ceiling levels.
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Parents’ views of the video
This final set of questions is the most important of the study, for they create the context within which parents use and respond to the video. When asked at pre-test whether they expected the primary purpose of the video to be education or entertainment, the vast majority of parents (79%) selected education, with only 21% predicting that its main purpose would be entertainment.
At the end of the study, those parents in the treatment group were asked in more detail about their views of the video. The results indicate that parents continued to regard it in an educational capacity. They said that they felt their children had learned a fair amount about road safety from watching the video (M = 3.85 on a five-point scale) and that it had affected their children’s behaviour to a fair extent (M = 3.45). It had also caused them, as parents, to think more about road safety issues (M = 4.00) and they felt it to be a very useful teaching tool (M = 4.33).
Overall, these findings suggest that parents regard The Busy Road Show video as an effective educational aid. This perspective is in place before they watch the video and is maintained after viewing it in their homes over a period of some weeks. Critically, however, this view stands in conflict with all the other evidence gathered in this study, which shows absolutely no change in children’s knowledge or parents’ own views.
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Discussion |
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The methods utilized in this study yielded no evidence that the video was serving an effective educational function, for either parents or children, when used in an ordinary capacity at home. This was a very clear outcome. The pattern of null findings was thoroughly consistent, over the large number of items analysed. Children’s knowledge of road safety showed no change over time nor did parents’ awareness change over the course of the study. However, parents viewed the video as an effective educational tool. Their assessment conflicts with the evidence and this mismatch flags issues about the way in which the video should be promoted.
The data for parents’ expectations for the video are the centerpiece around which the rest of the findings are best evaluated. This is because their expectations create the context in which they will purchase and use it. Nearly 80% of the parents in the sample predicted, before acquiring the video, that its primary purpose would be educational, rather than entertainment. That view did not change as a consequence of watching the video over a 4-week period. When parents in the treatment group were asked, at the end of the study, how much they thought their child had learned from the video, a generous mean was obtained. When asked how effective they thought it would be as a way of teaching children about road safety, responses approached the top of the scale. Parents even reported that children’s behaviour had been affected considerably by watching it. Thus, they regarded the video as an educational tool and they believed it was effective in that regard.
However, the remainder of the data gathered conflict with this interpretation. No evidence at all emerged from this study to suggest that the video is functioning effectively in an educational capacity. At the end of a month, there was no change in children’s knowledge about any of the pedestrian tasks investigated nor was there a change in parental awareness. Such findings accord with previous research reports, in which authors conclude that techniques need to be focused and intensive if they are to be successful in teaching children about road safety [for a review, see (Thomson et al., 1996)]. This is particularly the case with young children because they have difficulty understanding and transferring the verbal concepts of road safety (Cattell and Lewis, 1975; Sheppard, 1975; Vinje, 1981; Antaki et al., 1986). Singh (Singh, 1982) went as far as to argue that video materials are almost never effective in improving children’s knowledge or behaviour. Thus, there is little reason to expect that, and no evidence to support parental beliefs that, standard home viewing of the video will have an educational impact on their children.
Nor does the video appear to influence parents’ views on road safety. Parents in this sample tended to be overly confident about their 5-year-olds’ abilities to cope with roads and traffic, rating their children’s skills very positively and generally allowing them independence (on quiet roads) by the age of 7 years. However, research has demonstrated that young children do not generally have the ability to cope alone with the demands of the pedestrian environment [e.g. (Save the Children, 1998; Scottish Development Department, 1989; Thomson et al., 1992)]. Tolmie et al. (Tolmie et al., 1999) concluded that children should be accompanied until age 8, because they do not develop the cognitive skills to think flexibly and strategically until that point. The video appears to do little to attenuate parents’ views, given that neither their evaluations of children’s abilities nor their attitude toward protection/exposure changed over the course of the month. Their delivery of road safety training also stayed static, in part because they regarded themselves at pre-test as offering a high level of training. Once again, research studies using observational methods [e.g. (Zeedyk and Kelly, 2003, in press)] suggest that parents are less attentive and consistent in their pedestrian supervision than they believe themselves to be. Thomson et al. [(Thomson et al., 1996), p. 45)] suggest that parents who become involved in road safety educational programmes often adopt more protective attitudes as a result of increased awareness of children’s vulnerabilities. Thus, the absence of such a shift in the present data set strengthens the conclusion that home-based video viewing is not delivering an educational message to parents. Such an interpretation accords with the conclusions formed more widely within the health promotion field, that interventions targeting a mass audience are rarely effective in producing attitudinal or behavioural change [for a review, see (Tones and Tilford, 2001)].
Could methodological issues have contributed to the lack of findings? Perhaps a month is not long enough to cultivate a change in children’s knowledge or parents’ awareness. We would argue, on the contrary, that it is within the first month that such a change is most likely to occur. It is during the first few weeks after the video is acquired that it will be novel, and is therefore most likely to retain children’s and parents’ interest, and thus exert influence. It might also be suggested that the items used in the assessments were not sufficiently sensitive to detect change. This is always possible with questionnaire items, particularly when used with children. However, the terminology used in the children’s items was designed to make it easier, rather than more difficult, to detect an effect of the video. The use of phrases identical to those in the songs should strongly have advantaged the treatment group’s performance, but that outcome did not occur. Future work might employ alternative methods or contexts for data gathering purposes. For example, interviews would provide richer insights into parents’ reasoning than questionnaires can do and it may be that testing children within an active traffic environment, as opposed to a detached classroom, would have assisted their memory recall. Practicalities imposed limitations on the kinds of data we were able to collect on this occasion, which is a problem frequently experienced in health education research [as discussed by (Tones and Tilford, 2001)].
This set of null findings may seem unsurprising, given that they derive from the casual, home-based use of an entertaining children’s video. However, they serve as reminder of some valuable points. Parents, as well as other interested parties, deserve to know the extent to which a teaching tool can reasonably be said to be effective. Grayson [(Grayson, 1981), p. 170] once stated that ‘safety education may be an act of faith’, but where there is evidence to help in appraising that faith, it needs to be made available. This is because studies have shown that children’s chances of being involved in an accident can actually increase with training [e.g. (Gregersen and Nolen, 1994; Johansson, unpublished)]. This may occur because parents allow children greater freedom on roads, believing falsely that their knowledge has increased and will automatically transfer to their on-road behaviour. Thus, providers of road safety materials need to ensure they do not, even inadvertently, foster ‘misleading’ parental expectations [(Thomson et al., 1996), p. 42].
In retrospect, it would have been useful to ask parents more about why they expected the video to be educational, perhaps through brief interviews. This was not done because, as is typically the case with exploratory research, we did not know at the outset how critical this point would become. However, the comments of one parent may be informative in this regard. In the course of speaking with us by telephone a week after the study had begun, she stated that ‘the Scottish Road Safety Campaign’s stamp on the front of the video tells me this would be a good thing for my child’. Terms such as ‘teach’ and ‘lessons’, included on the video packaging, further imply that educational benefits can be gained. There is thus every reason to expect that other parents will share the expectations of the parents in this sample that the video is, primarily, an educational tool.
Road safety is a topic that continues to draw attention from groups throughout British society. The Singing Kettle are to be commended for raising the profile of road safety by providing a product that creates opportunities for children and parents to talk about relevant issues. However, it is important to ensure that users of the video are not encouraged to equate watching or discussing the video with ‘increased knowledge’ or ‘improved behaviour’, as the parents in this study appear to have done. There may well be other ways that the video could serve an educational function, perhaps as part of a structured programme and that possibility provides an avenue for future research. The important message to be gained from the present project is that, when used on a casual basis at home, The Busy Road Show video is better regarded as entertainment than edutainment.
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Acknowledgements |
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We are grateful to the parents and children who chose to take part in this study, and also to the headteachers and staff at the five schools who assisted us with its administration: Ancrum Road Primary, Clepington Primary, Longhaugh Primary, MacAlpine Primary and St Ninian’s Primary. James Young and Alastair Joss, of Tayside Police, provided professional support, and Joanne Gallacher and Susannah Hamilton assisted with data collection. The study was funded by the Scottish Road Safety Campaign, the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions, and Singing Kettle Productions. Our thanks go to the Editor and two anonymous referees for comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript.
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Received on November 11, 2001; accepted on July 9, 2002
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