Introduction

In the United States, more than 300,000 persons were injured and more than 15,935 persons (38% of crash fatalities) died in alcohol-related motor vehicle crashes during 1998 (Traffic Safety Facts 1998, National Center for Statistics and Analysis, NHTSA). In comparison to the mid-1980's, these figures reflect a significant reduction in alcohol-impaired driving, but the toll of injuries and fatalities remains unacceptably high.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), along with many other national, state and local level partners, have aggressively worked toward reducing the incidence of alcohol-related motor vehicle crashes. Passage of the 21-year-old minimum drinking age and zero tolerance laws in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, as well as the fact that 17 states and D.C. now have .08 per se laws is indicative of continuing progress in this area.

The 1997 survey represented the fourth in a series of biennial surveys begun in 1991. The objective of these studies is to measure the current status of attitudes, knowledge and behavior of the general driving age public with respect to drinking and driving. The data collected are used to track the nature and scope of the drinking-driving problem and to identify areas in need of further attention in the pursuit of reduced drinking and driving.

Of particular interest is how these attitudes and behaviors differ among minority groups so that programs and policies can be affected to address the specific needs of various groups.

While a sufficient number of persons of different racial backgrounds is not surveyed in any one year of the study to provide a statistically valid sample for comparison, over several administrations of the surveys an adequate number of persons are represented. This report combines data from the 1993, 1995 and 1997 survey administrations to provide an analysis of the differences in attitudes and behaviors among Non-Hispanic Whites, Non-Hispanic Blacks, Asian/Pacific Islanders, Native Americans/Eskimos and Hispanics.

Since previous analyses of these data have shown that the majority of the drinking and driving problem is among the driving age population under age 65, only those age 16-64 are included in this special analysis.

The 1991 administration was not included in this analysis as substantial changes were made to the survey administration between the 1991 and 1993 administrations and many of the key questions of interest were not included in the 1991 study.

Readers are referred to the National Survey of Drinking and Driving Attitudes and Behaviors: 1997 (Balmforth, 1997) report for a fully detailed description of the research methods used.

The sampling objective of each of the study waves was to acquire a representative national sample of the general driving age public (age 16 and older). A telephone survey was used to reach the target population and to provide national estimates of attitudes and behaviors regarding drinking and driving.

A two-stage procedure was used to meet the sampling objective by first selecting a sample of working residential telephone numbers in the U.S. (both listed and unlisted residential telephone households) with an equal probability of selection. The second stage involved a random selection of a single respondent from all eligible members of driving age residing in each selected household using the "most recent birthday" method.

Multiple attempts were made to reach each randomly selected respondent. Up to seven attempts were made to reach the household, and once a respondent in the household was identified, up to seven additional attempts were made to reach that person.

While the original three studies included responses from persons age 16 and older, this analysis highlights the findings of persons age 16 to 64. The following numbers of telephone interviews with persons age 16 to 64 were conducted each administration:

1993     3,624 1995     3,490 1997     3,339

Interviewing for each administration took place in the Fall (generally between October and December of the study year). Interviews were completed in both English- and Spanish-language, using a computer-assisted-telephone interviewing (CATI) system.

The final telephone samples of persons age 16 and older were independently weighted using a four-stage weighting procedure to equalize selection probabilities (at both the household and the individual levels) and to adjust for non-response bias by matching the profile of surveyed respondents to the known demographic profile of the U.S. population 16 to 64.

The goal of this analysis was to identify the differences in attitudes and behaviors of different racial and ethnic groups. NHTSA was interested in analyzing the differences between groups of persons who are of White, Black, Asian, American Indian and Hispanic origin. Since the data were weighted to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, and the Census defines race separately from ethnicity, the following questions were used to identify the race and ethnicity of the respondents:

While Hispanic is viewed as an ethnicity descriptor rather than a race, and is thus mutually exclusive to race, for the purposes of this analysis, the goal was to look at comparisons of the five groups. Thus, the following categorization was used to achieve a single race/ethnic categorization:

If a respondent noted that they were both Hispanic and Asian or American Indian/Eskimo, the race of the respondent (Asian, American Indian/Eskimo) took precedence over ethnicity (Hispanic). The number of combined interviews by race/ethnicity of person age 16-64 across the three administrations appear below:

The study examines the results from the three combined survey administrations in the following chapters:

Attempts were made to show the above data for each of the five racial/ethnic groups. However in some instances data are not available for all three administrations (as a number of key questions were added in the 1995 administration), or survey questions were asked of only a subset of the population (e.g. drinking-drivers). In such instances, the racial/ethnic categories may be condensed further to compare Whites, Blacks and Other, or White, Black, Hispanic, Other where sample sizes allow. It should be noted that the precision of the estimates for these analyses is lower than those noted above for the full sample. To help aid in the assessment of sampling error precision, the sample size of presented subgroups is presented for each data chart.

The following table shows the overall measures of drinking and driving used as bases throughout this report.

It should be noted that problem drinkers are not by definition drinker-drivers, as they may not drive after consuming alcohol.

Trip: a single occasion a person drove a motor vehicle

Drinking-driving trip: a trip in which a person drove a motor vehicle within two hours of consuming alcohol

BAC (Blood Alcohol Concentration) Estimate V (calculated using the following formula):