Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 377-389). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

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When accidents occur, citizens often are the real first responders. This has been acknowledged and studied from an international perspective, particularly in relation to large crises and disasters, but remains relatively unstudied from a Swedish perspective. This thesis takes its point of departure from people who have been emergency callers or witnesses to traffic accidents, studying their actions and interactions at the scene of an accident in terms of boundaries, positioning and emergence. The aim of this thesis is to study how people’s actions in a specific situation are affected by their interactions with both real and imagined others and how their actions are affected by the spatial context. The thesis consists of four individual studies that relate differently to the main aim of the thesis. The first study focuses on first responders’ options to act in a place that simultaneously is the workplace of emergency personnel: the incident site. This study shows how first responders’ options to act are governed in large part by their interaction with emergency personnel and their boundary practices at the incident site. In this study, we apply theories of boundary practices from Nippert-Eng and the concept of boundary work from Gieryn to explain how emergency personnel control their place of work through boundary practices and through that process control those first responders who are present at the site. In other words, people’s actions at the incident site are affected by both the social and the spatial context. The second study focuses on a limited selection of first responders: those who have placed emergency calls. Through interviews with callers and transcriptions of their emergency calls, this study explores how the callers frame their decision to stop and place the call through different presentations of self. These presentations are constructed through moral positioning, in which the callers position themselves and their actions in relation to both real and imagined others. Thus, the callers also construct normative accounts of what is considered a “preferable” and “non-preferable” way to act at the scene of an accident. The third study takes its point of departure from theories and previous research on emergence because they have been used by disaster sociologists to explain how citizens are the real first responders to crises and disasters. Through the concepts of emergent behavior and emergent norms, papers in this research field have argued that people in these situations act according to “new and not-yet-institutionalized behavior guidelines”. In this study, I argue that emergence, in other words, citizens as the real first responders, is also present in everyday emergencies. Through the narratives of citizen first responders, I explore how they frame their actions through different normative narratives. These normative narratives are not necessarily emergent, however. Rather, the interviewees use past experience and presentations of self to justify their actions at the scene of an accident. The fourth study is an ethnographic reflection of the researcher’s place-bounded identity in a field study that revolves around several different places. Rather than focusing on a story of first responders, this study focuses on the researcher’s, i.e., my own, story from the scene of an accident, the fire truck and the fire station. What I have been able to study through these different studies are stories of actions rather than “actual” actions or behaviors. In these stories, it becomes clear that first responders relate to both a social and spatial context as they provide accounts of their actions at the scene of an accident. They relate to a social context because they frame their actions through their interactions with different actors and position themselves in relation to those actors—and in relation to a spatial context. That is, they perform their actions in a place that is someone else’s place of work, with jurisdictional claims of both legitimacy and control. In summary, this thesis contributes a deeper knowledge of how citizen first responders interpret, understand and tell the story of their actions at the scene of an accident. The contribution considers the fact that citizen first responders are something of a “blind spot”, not only in the field of emergency research but also for emergency personnel who do not always acknowledge the experience of first responders at the scene of accidents.

The aim of this study was to explore how psychosocial lived experiences of taxi drivers explain accident involvement in Uganda. Face to face in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with six male taxi drivers who survived accidents while driving and still served as taxi drivers. The sample was identified with purposive and snowball sampling techniques. Ethical considerations were observed during data collection through transcription, analysis to the final compilation. Interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) was employed to each participant’s discernment of the specific and general accounts of accident narratives in a bid to make "sense" of their lived worlds as drivers and accident involvement. Three superordinate themes illuminating accidents emerged out of the data: typical routines of taxi drivers; the socio-cultural context; and the taxi drivers’ community. These were discussed based on relevant theories and previous studies as well as pertinent concepts. Considering the study results, typical routines of taxi drivers, driver community factors and social/cultural factors affect each other, these together leave driver-accident involvement inevitable. Categorically such factors include; age, formal education, driving training, driver health status, domestic concerns, significant others, competitive driving / worse-worse, other road users, Impulsive pick and drop-off of passengers, theft, driver stress, state of the road, state of the vehicle among others. Thus behavioural and cognitive remedies are herein suggested towards ameliorative and/or transformative processes of the accident endemic.

A few years ago bicycles, buses and trains were the main mode of transport for the movement of indigent persons and goods in the study area of Mafikeng. From the late seventies, with the advent of taxis everywhere, these established modes of transport diminished to an extent that, in this recent study, well over 90 percent of the 200 interviewed commuters, were shown to be affirmed regular minibus-taxi passengers. It has been proved by this research and others that the taxi industry, provides passengers with a relatively comfortable and acceptable transport system. However, an increase in vehicle ownership and the flourishing taxi business, have complicated and compromised road traffic with resultant complex and serious problems of traffic safety to road congestion and related violation of the road rules by reckless taxi drivers. Unparalled deaths and expenses resulted from delays, accidents and incidental violence, a situation which is detrimental to the sustainable development of the capital's economy, road users and destroyed properties. If the Mafikeng society is to continue in stability, certain essential tasks need to be put into operation. If the city fails, society may disintegrate or change its form drastically. A certain degree of order and stability are essential for the survival of the social system. The study therefore, recommended, inter alia, that a prerequisite be set rigorously, to guide and educate members into the acceptable ways of society. so as to empower and ease the burden of the police and legal systems in keeping a firm check on any deviation from traffic safety and that, the aim and objectives of taxi associations. primarily be on the improvement of services provided by its members to the public. / (MBA) North-West University, Mafikeng Campus, 2005

This thesis tests one of the major propositions of deterrence theory: that increases in the severity of punishment can reduce the likelihood of offending. To this end, a case study in which the statutory penalties were doubled for almost all drink-driving offences in New South Wales, Australia, is examined. Two quasi-experimental studies were undertaken to assess the impact of these legislative changes: an interrupted time-series analysis of road crash rates (Study 1) and an analysis of drink-driving reoffending rates before and after the penalty changes were implemented (Study 2). Study 1 showed a significant increase in a surrogate measure of alcohol-related road crashes after the tougher drink-driving penalties were introduced. Further analyses suggested that this increase was driven primarily by a secular rise in non alcohol-related crashes that coincided with the policy???s implementation. Two possible conclusions about the deterrent effect of the policy are drawn from these findings: (1) that there was a reduction in alcohol-related road crashes which was overwhelmed by the rise in non alcohol-related crashes occurring around the same time or (2) that there was no change in crash rates. Study 2 found that drink-drivers who were convicted under the new penalty regime were less likely, and took longer, to reoffend than drink-drivers convicted before the introduction of the new penalties. This reduction in reoffending was only apparent for drink-drivers residing in country and regional areas and was small in magnitude.These latter findings are consistent with the possibility that the penalty changes coincided with a reduction in alcohol-related crashes but suggest that any decrease is likely to have been relatively small. A third study using a scenario-based survey methodology was also undertaken to examine the relationship between legal sanctions and willingness to drink-drive, controlling for other factors. The results of this study showed that participants who were more knowledgeable about drink-driving penalties were less likely to state that they would offend in the drink-driving scenario than participants who were less knowledgeable about the law. The implications of these findings for deterrence theory and criminal justice policy are discussed.

Tez (Tıpta Uzmanlık) - Süleyman Demirel Üniversitesi, Tıp Fakültesi, Halk Sağlığı Anabilim Dalı, 2005. / Bibliyografya var.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Edith Cowan University, 2006. / Submitted to the Faculty of Computing, Health and Science. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. S.)--Michigan State University. Dept. of Fisheries and Wildlife, 2006. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on June 19, 2009) Includes bibliographical references. Also issued in print.