Journal of Safety Research

Journal of Safety Research

Volume 59, December 2016, Pages 69-82
Journal of Safety Research

The antecedents, experience, and coping strategies of driver boredom in young adult males

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2016.10.007Get rights and content

Highlights

  • A qualitative inquiry is presented to investigate driver boredom without interrupting the subjective experience.

  • Antecedents to driver boredom include low traffic, slow or constant speed, and routine drives.

  • The experience is associated with discomfort and bears similarities with boredom at work (unlike boredom at home).

  • Coping mechanisms include strategies related to the driving task such as speeding and avoidance strategies such as phone use.

Abstract

Introduction

Road crash statistics are evidence of the severe consequences resulting from human error, especially among young adult males. Drivers perform best and safest when they are adequately engaged in the driving task. Boredom and a lack of engagement in the driving task may cause risk taking and phone use. However, the antecedents to driver boredom, the subjective experience itself, as well as the coping strategies to combat boredom are not well understood. The aim of this study was to investigate these aspects.

Method

We carried out a qualitative study in a simulated, safe, yet highly immersive driving environment. The 24 participants included male drivers aged 18 to 25 susceptible to risky driving and phone use. A phenomenological framework was used to analyze their accounts of the experience of boredom while driving.

Results

Results indicate that situations giving rise to driver boredom include low traffic, slow or constant speed, and routine drives. Feelings comprising the experience were frustration, vigilance, relaxing, autopilot, mind wandering, and discomfort. Coping mechanisms manifest themselves in approach strategies related to the driving task such as speeding, which are often dangerous, and avoidance strategies, which include phone use.

Conclusions

We conclude that driver boredom bears similarities to the experience of boredom at work (unlike boredom at home) due to the situational constraints, where people feel stuck, trapped, or obliged to remain vigilant.

Practical applications

The findings present an opportunity for the road safety and automotive technology community to address the issue of under-stimulation through safety interventions aimed at increased task engagement. Our work can also aid in investigating driver experiences in partially automated driving, which is likely to induce boredom as well.

Introduction

According to the World Health Organisation (2013), more than one million people die annually in road accidents worldwide, and another twenty to fifty million are injured. Young drivers aged 17 to 24 account for the most fatalities (Qld Gov, 2015). Among those, males are three times as likely to be killed in a car crash as females. One of the underlying factors is that young people and especially young males typically score high in sensation seeking behaviors (Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978). Perhaps lesser known is the following: (a) Young males are also more prone to feeling bored (Drory, 1982); (b) boredom proneness is a stable rather than transient personality trait (Harvey, Heslop, & Thorpe, 2011), and; (c) sensation seeking and boredom proneness are directly correlated (Zuckerman, 1994). A lack of stimulation while driving can lead particularly young drivers to feeling bored. This uncomfortable state may then trigger the seeking of sensations (e.g., speeding) or distractions (e.g., phone use), which in turn can lead to accidents (Fuller, 2005). However, driver boredom is not well understood, especially among this group of drivers most at risk.

The aim of this study is to investigate the phenomenon of driver boredom in young male adults. To address the research aim, we sought to answer the following research questions. They built upon the work by Martin, Sadlo, and Stew (2006) on boredom in general (all demographics and contexts).

  • RQ1:

    What are antecedents to driver boredom? (see Section 5.1).

  • RQ2:

    What is the subjective experience of driver boredom? (see Section 5.2).

  • RQ3:

    What are coping strategies to combat driver boredom? (see Section 5.3).

Our contribution is twofold. First, we propose an approach for investigating state boredom in the driving context without interrupting the experience. Second, we present empirical data from a study with 24 young male drivers and discussing them.

Section snippets

Defining boredom

One definition of boredom categorizes it as “the aversive experience of having an unfulfilled desire to be engaged in satisfying activity” (Fahlman et al., 2013). The feeling associated with this experience is perceived as negative and uncomfortable, resulting in the individual's desire to alleviate the adverse feeling. Boredom has been further broken down into components of arousal, stimulation, engagement, and attention. It is important to define and describe these terms in order to

Studying human factors in the driving context

Many human actors affect driver behavior and, as a result, road safety. Among them are anger (e.g., Gulian et al., 1990), stress (e.g., Rowden et al., 2011), frustration (e.g., El Chliaoutakis et al., 2002, Harris and Houston, 2010), fatigue (e.g., Philip et al., 2005), risk perception (e.g., Fuller, McHugh, & Pender, 2008), cognitive load (e.g., Palinko et al., 2010), sensation seeking (e.g., Dahlen et al., 2005), and impulsiveness (e.g., Stanford et al., 1996). The methods by which these

Theoretical framework

To investigate state boredom in the driving context, we chose a phenomenological inquiry approach. Phenomenology is the study of lived experience (Heidegger, 1988, Husserl, 1970). As summarized by Patton (2014), it explores how human beings make sense of experience and transform experience into consciousness. The value of phenomenology, as pointed out by Adams and van Manen (2008), lies in prioritizing how people subjectively experience the world. Unlike methodological frameworks centered

Results

In the following, we present the findings from our data analysis. Fig. 4 provides an overview of those findings as proposed by Miles et al. (2013: 92).

Discussion

Taking existing literature into account, we will discuss the data across four themes: antecedents, experience, coping strategies, and optimism bias.

Limitations

Although the study was carefully designed, we are aware of some limitations. Our investigation was primarily concerned with the experiences of individual drivers without any passengers. However, we invited two participants at a time and one of them sat on the passenger's side. We asked participants to imagine being by themselves without anyone next to them to talk to, but we do recognize that the experience might be a slightly different one. Our rationale behind this study setup was to foster a

Summary

We investigated the unique and safety-critical context of driver boredom in a qualitative study. We examined the data through a phenomenology lens and closely investigated the subjective experience of driver boredom, expanding on the work by Martin et al. (2006) on the boredom phenomenon in work and home contexts and on work by Heslop (2014) on individual difference predictors and behavioral effects of driver boredom.

As part of our findings, we presented antecedents associated with driver

Acknowledgements

This work was supported under the Australian Research Council's Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (ARC DECRA) funding scheme (project number DE140101542). We would like to acknowledge Verena Lindner and Diana Babiac who provided assistance with the study and Marcus Foth for providing valuable comments on the manuscript.

Fabius Steinberger is a doctoral researcher with the Urban Informatics Research Lab at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia. He investigates driver boredom and explores approaches to safely re-engage drivers in the driving task.

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    Fabius Steinberger is a doctoral researcher with the Urban Informatics Research Lab at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia. He investigates driver boredom and explores approaches to safely re-engage drivers in the driving task.

    April Moeller is a doctoral researcher with the Scientific Reasoning and Argumentation Group and the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Munich, Germany. She was a visitor at the Urban Informatics Research Lab at QUT. Her background is in neuro-cognitive psychology.

    Ronald Schroeter is a senior research fellow with the Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety – Queensland (CARRS-Q) at QUT. His main research interest lies in translating human-centered design concepts to road safety.

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    Present address: Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Munich, Leopoldstrasse 13, 80802 Munich, Germany

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