AN ANALYSIS OF THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE RENEWAL RULES TESTS AND THE ACCIDENT AND VIOLATION HISTORIES

The North Carolina Highway Safety Reseach Center has caused a new set of renewal applicants written rules tests to be constructed for use in the North Carolina driver licensing program. Differing in content and structure from earlier tests used for this purpose, it was imperative that the qualities of this new battery of tests be explored. The emphasis of the analysis has been upon the capability of the tests to predict the accident and violation behavior of drivers in North Carolina. The demography of the applicants has been developed, as the relationships between the rules tests and other variables, including accidents and violations, and principal components analysis. In their current form, the new renewal tests possess limited capability of predicting accidents and/or violations and, their application as screening tests is correspondingly limited. The new renewal tests possess a unifactor structure which is not the best approach where more than one attribute must be measured. The evaluation system is seen to be relatively complete, though the criterion development problem is still with us. The per-mile accident rate of high scorers on the tests is quite superior to that of low test scorers. (MW)