"I am a good driver": young people's constructions of themselves as road users.

Young people, especially young men, are a key target of a range of safe-driving social marketing campaigns. Yet they continue to be overrepresented as drivers in road crashes. Interviews with a small sample of young drivers show that they understand driving in terms of skill, judgment and carefulness, but focus on skill. Despite their own evidence that they often drive dangerously, they represent themselves as good drivers, in part by using skill rather than care as the crucial criterion. This enables them to ignore the implications of both their 'occasional lapses' and 'drive safety' messages.

It is widely acknowledged that young people, especially young men, comprise the most dangerous group of drivers on Australian roads. They are overrepresented in crashes (Australian Transport Safety Bureau 2004), and figure prominently in road rage, drink-driving, speeding and car surfing incidents (Parliament of New South Wales 2004; Parliament of Victoria 2005; Lal & Craig 2004-5; Legislative Assembly of Queensland 2003; Stevenson et al. 2001). For these reasons they are widely targeted in campaigns aimed at persuading them to drive more carefully. Yet, the constancy of the crash statistics indicates that these campaigns have had limited impact on young drivers' behaviour.

Many attempts to understand what makes young drivers so dangerous focus on psychological attributes, including a propensity for risk-taking, a belief in their invulnerability and an "optimism bias", with recent indications that some of these attributes might be linked to aspects of adolescent brain development (Arnett 2002; Beckham 2004; Begg & Langley 2001; Harry, Brandt & Dawe 2000; Hatfield & Job 2001). Other research focuses on situational variables, including social contexts of driving and the combination of driving with drinking (Rice, Peek-Asa & Kraus 2003; Triggs & Smith 1996; Williams 2003). Yet others have investigated young people's driving behaviour, including their tendency to speed and to drive long distances and late at night (Triggs & Smith 1996). In the research, inexperience ranks highly as a contributing factor, which compounds psychological and situational factors, and driving characteristics, by reducing the likelihood of young drivers successfully negotiating difficult situations (Triggs & Smith 1996).

Such research is clearly crucial in documenting young people's contribution to danger on the roads, and in developing an understanding of how this is shaped. Recently, a number of studies have explored more sociological, culturally-oriented ways of understanding these issues. They have focused in particular on the intersection of car and driving cultures, and cultures of adolescence and masculinity (Parliament of Victoria 2005; Redshaw 2001, 2004; Vick 2003; Walker, Butland & Connell 2000).

If we are to understand how young people "immunise" themselves against seeing their driving as problematic, and against safe-driving messages directed at them, it is important to connect such socially sustained frameworks of meaning to individual behaviour. Poststructuralism offers one approach to understanding how "external" systems of meaning are connected to "internal" senses of self through the theorising of subjectivity.

Briefly, poststructuralism sees the self--"subjectivity"--as formed through the take-up of possible subject positions, defined simultaneously through language and social practices. The range of positions on offer is always vast, and includes both "locations" in a conceptual mapping of the world (male; adolescent; driver) and the qualitative ways in which those positions may be occupied (macho male; mature adolescent; good driver). These break down into further possibilities (good driver: skilful, law-abiding, careful, considerate, never had a crash). Subjectivity, then, is not a fixed "property", and is never singular or related to a single dimension of life. Subjectivities are inextricably bound to constructions of desire and its objects. For example, in driving behaviour, to be macho is to desire certain objects and states of being, and to pursue fulfilment of that desire (Connell 1995; Vick 2003).

This view of subjectivity as discursively constructed also holds that as people talk about their experience, they bring into play complex, multiple senses of who they are. In this paper, this approach is used to explore how young people construct themselves as drivers, as a contribution to understanding how they might shape and rationalise their driving behaviour, and their responses to safe-driving messages.

The paper draws on an exploratory study that used a semi-structured, one-on-one interview format with undergraduates who lived on campus at a provincial university and who drove long distances between "home" and campus. Interviewees were volunteers recruited by email through the university's residential halls. Fourteen students responded, and interviews were arranged with 12 of them (six male, six female). All except one were aged between 18 and 22. The purpose of the interviews (explained in the recruitment email, and clarified prior to commencement of interview) was to explore subjects' experience of driver fatigue in the context of long-distance driving, and their responses to a range of related issues.

Interviewees were asked for factual information on conditions, distances and frequencies of their long-distance driving, for narratives of drives they had undertaken, and for reflective responses to general questions about distance driving. The interviews were audiotaped and transcribed. The narrative and "commentary" elements in the transcripts were analysed to extract accounts of how respondents "saw" themselves as drivers, how they relate that to their more general sense of themselves, and their understandings of what constituted good (and bad) driving and drivers.

This paper draws principally on two of the interviews, those with "David" and "Amy". In keeping with the terms of ethics approval and the conditions of participation outlined in the informed consent, I have used pseudonyms for all participants. These interviews were reasonably representative of the range of views and driving behaviours discussed in the other interviews.

Narratives, commentaries and self-constructions

As an introduction to the discussion section, the following extracts from the interview with Amy provide some indication of the sort of data obtained, and how it was analysed.

Amy talks about memorable incidents on her fortnightly 350km drive between home and university:

   I've seen a lot of stupid things done,
   like, "You can't overtake now, there isn't
   enough distance. You're crazy". I analyse
   other people's driving: I didn't think he
   would make it, but he did. I acknowledge,
   "Well, that was a good piece of judgement
   there".

She switches, unprompted, between her story about "what happened" and her commentary on it. Almost 10 minutes later, she tells a story about her practical driving test.

   I got my licence first time. But the thing
   the cop said, "It was a beautiful drive
   except for one intersection through town
   there". (There was a car coming, and I
   thought I could make so I, like, floored
   it out of that intersection.) And he criticised
   my judgment. And from then on I
   thought, "Oh, I've got had judgment. I've
   got to improve that".

Here, she offers both a narrative about her driving test, and a commentary on it. In both extracts, the commentary explains the significance of the story and makes an evaluative comment about driving that draws on implicit criteria for assessing driving and the driver. While both stories are clearly about driving, they are also about Amy herself, about what she values in drivers and what she aspires to be--her desires--as a driver. Further, while the two incidents and their associated commentaries are well separated in the interview, they are linked by their common concern with judgment. Finally, Amy presents herself as learning from these incidents.

What is good driving?

While none of the interviewees talk explicitly about what makes a "good driver", they all tell stories that tacitly construct criteria defining good driving. Thus, in the extract already quoted, Amy says, in effect: overtaking when there isn't room is bad driving; good driving involves knowing when you can overtake. These criteria can be seen to fall into two broad categories: skill and judgment, and care.

Skill and judgment

Interviewer: So would you rate yourself as a good driver?

David: Tough question! I don't know. I haven't been in situations where I needed to get out of accidents, but I've got pretty good reaction times.

A good driver, then, is one who has the skills to manage a vehicle, even under difficult conditions (an impending crash). Skills in turn depend on a combination of cognitive and motor functioning (reaction times).

In relating her early experience as a teenager from a country town living and driving in Brisbane, Amy also indicated that she considers good driving is a matter of skills. She talked about learning a range of technical competencies, such as judging distances and traffic speed, adding that visitors from "home", "were amazed how well I handled the traffic". Like David, she implicitly took ability to handle driving conditions as the criterion by which a driver can be judged for competency.

Elsewhere, she talked about being taught matters of technique at a driving school. The interviewer asked her if she was taught other things as well:

   Oh well, that's the only stuff they teach
   you ... how to drive around town. There's
   nothing about safety issues ... Nothing
   about long distance driving, nothing
   about night-time driving. My parents
   taught me that when you're driving at
   night and a car's coming towards you
   look [gestures down and left] to the left,
   to the side of the road, let your eyes follow
   the white line so you don't get blinded.

Again, her examples of "safety issues" are examples of driving technique.

Here, Amy and David draw on a discourse of mastery and control, which circulates widely in Western cultures. This is linked, on the one hand, to masculinity (which makes Amy's use of it especially interesting; cf. Redshaw 2005), and, on the other, to science, technology, industry and economic exploitation. It is one of the dominant discourses of the culture, and forms a deeply rooted, generalised, highly positive value (Connell 1995).

Both Amy and David link skills to practical knowledge derived from experience, especially in stories which compare earlier drives with later ones. David, for example, when talking about the 900km drive he does several times a year, stated that:

   The first time, I stuck to the speed limit
   because I didn't know what was out
   there, basically, but now I tend to go a
   little faster, because I know what's out
   there, within the bounds--excluding
   animals and accidents and stuff.

Amy, similarly, stated that her knowledge of one section of the road (the Cardwell Range section: narrow, winding, often wet, with low visibility and little distance between the edges of the road and the face of the cutting on one side and the densely forested sheer drop on the other) changed her driving:

   I still do 80 even through it's signed as
   40km, because I know what the car can
   do now. When I first went through there
   I would do 40, then up to 60 and now
   up to 80.

She is able to do this, she explains, "Because I know the road ... because I've done it so many times now". More generally, she says several times, explaining her level of skill or her capacity to instruct her less skilful peers, "For my age [20], I've had a lot of experience".

Culturally, "experience" is widely taken as an unproblematic basis for "true" knowledge, from phenomenology, through research methods that privilege the first-hand accounts of events and situations of those "who were there", to popular media current events programs (Moore & Muller 1999; Perry & Power 2004). The appeal to experience is a powerful validator of young people's claims to speak with authority and, in this case, to have reliable and valid knowledge about driving.

Care and responsibility

Another understanding of good driving focuses on care and responsibility. For example, David says:

   I keep a safe enough distance between
   cars, and I don't commit stupid acts ... just
   stay distances between the cars ... sensibly
   and ... understand [the situation]
   a bit more.

He is sharply critical of what he sees as bad driving in others:

   They just pull out anywhere. Go really
   slowly and just pull in again. They seem
   to do ... no, they do make stupid manoeuvres
   ... They just pull out when there's a
   row of four cars and they overtake, and if
   they can't make it they just pull back in.

His reference point, here, is not judgment or skill, but care, so as not to put other road users at risk. This involves what he sees as a proper sense of driving etiquette: "You should just wait your turn". And, rather than being bold, taking risks or driving at the upper limits of skill and judgment, he suggests that one should be "a bit wary".

This story sits interestingly alongside Amy's account of drivers overtaking under conditions that allow minimal room for error. As I noted above, Amy ties her story to issues of technique: judgment. David's is about the ethical dimension of driving: care or consideration for others.

However, the importance of being careful or sensible does surface in several of Amy's other stories and her commentaries on them, too. For instance, she suggests that her boyfriend and others like him, who treat the road like a race track, think that the general rules of the road and considerations of safety "don't really apply to them. They [think they] can drive, like, however they want".

Historically, discourses of "care" for others--the discourse that David draws on--have been associated with the feminine and the private domain (Gilligan 1987, 1995). It has also been argued that over recent decades, with the resurgence of competitive deregulated capitalism, moves to institute a public regime of care have been placed increasingly on the back foot, and directed at or confined to those with close personal ties, rather than taken as a broader social value (Wilkinson & Bittman 2003). Amy's discourse, which is about attending to the dangers posed by others, rather than caring for them, seems more consistent with this contracted view of caring, and to draw on the more "paranoid" discourses of danger that have come to dominate discourses about public life, from terrorism, through violence on the street to home invasions (Barcan 1998).

Shifting constructions

Given the varied ways David and Amy, and the others interviewed, constructed "good driving", it is important to note that, as they talked, they shifted between these ways fluidly and seemingly without noticing. Nevertheless, here, and in all the other interviews, the predominant view was that skill and judgment are what matter, first and foremost. This reflects the more general hegemony of discourses of control and the marginalisation of discourses of care in contemporary Australian culture (Barcan 1998; Wilkinson & Bittman 2003).

"I am a good driver"

Both Amy and David indicated that they considered themselves good drivers--Amy in her comments about how others were "amazed" at her skill, and David in response to my direct question. While there were relatively few comments as explicit as those, all interviewees made it clear in more subtle ways, that they considered themselves good drivers. They repeatedly narrated incidents in which they demonstrated care, skill or judgment, and juxtaposed such narratives with statements which linked those qualities to good driving.

In itself, these claims are hardly surprising: most drivers consider themselves to be better than average (job 1999). However, all those interviewed told stories that revealed that they often drove dangerously: driving to the point of extreme tiredness, or dozing off, and consistently and routinely speeding. Amy's interview, in particular, is littered with examples of dangerous behaviours: her high-speed negotiation of the Cardwell Range, driving "really buggered and half pissed", and a crash she caused by "driving too close".

What is important, here, is not the discrepancies themselves, but the discursive moves that allow Amy and David to maintain this positive view of themselves as good drivers, regardless of their actual driving practices. I call these "moves" rather than "strategies", since the latter suggests consciousness and an intent to rationalise, whereas it appears that Amy and David were largely unaware either of the gap between their self-perception and their practices, or of the ways they made that gap invisible to themselves.

Analysis of Amy and David's transcripts revealed six such discursive moves. First, they slip from what they do, to their general attitude: Amy, who already talked about driving "half pissed" said of the anti-drink-driving campaigns, "I take that seriously. I wouldn't drink-drive." And she saw herself as a very conscientious driver who constantly sought to improve, especially in areas she thought might be weaknesses.

Second, they situated actions of their own that they saw as dangerous as occasional exceptions to their usual practice. Of driving under the influence of "other drugs", Amy said, "No [I don't], except for "big day out". That's a big drug event, and I did drive to that event [stoned], but not normally".

Third, they contrasted themselves with others, who could easily be categorised as highly dangerous. In particular, they both set themselves off against macho male stereotypes--Amy with her boyfriend, who treated driving as if it were a race; David with both older males in powerful cars, and with more "macho" male peers.

Fourth, they downplayed, or even rationalised away the dangerousness of their driving. David, for instance, commented that on the open road he sat "comfortably over 100--yeah ..." but added "er, not too far over", and then commented that "in the grand scheme of things, I don't think that's a terrible crime". And Amy said she wrote notes to herself as she drove, but added, "I'm sounding really dangerous now"--not "I am dangerous", but "I sound dangerous". She then proceeded to explain why the practice was not actually as dangerous as it sounded--they were "just short notes".

Fifth, these two link constructions of themselves as drivers to their more general constructions of themselves as persons. One of the other interviewees, Bruce, provides the most concise and explicit illustration of this. He told of being stuck behind a truck on a narrow highway with limited overtaking opportunities, and explained the importance of being "patient", that "I'm a careful sort of person," and illustrated this observation with a story about his detailed investigation of rival service providers when buying a mobile phone. If being a good driver is a reflection of being a good person, these young drivers have a substantial investment in constructing themselves as good drivers.

Finally, constructing good driving in terms of technical competence makes it relatively easy for young people to classify themselves as "good drivers" with reference to their skill levels, without having to bring their specific high-risk behaviours into the picture.

These discursive manoeuvres constitute some of the critical means by which young people mobilise broader cultural understandings and values to articulate understanding of themselves, and to connect their qualities as persons to their behaviour.

So what?

One consequence of young people's construction of themselves as good drivers is that it offers them good grounds for ignoring messages about safe driving. Indeed, when asked to talk about road safety messages, not one of the subjects mentioned a single advertisement that spoke to them. David, for example, singled out the "Buckle-up" seatbelt campaigns as important and effective. Yet, he explained, he had been drilled since early childhood to wear a seatbelt, so that it "feels uncomfortable--it just feels wrong" not to. Consequently, he said, "Of course, [these ads] don't apply to me".

Amy deflected the same ad by taking a narrow, literal reading of its message; she commented: "The one with the seat belt and the teddy bear. I think that's crazy. [As if] you should only be careful if you've got children". She saw this and other road safety campaigns as missing the youth target audience with their "care for others" message rather than "care for yourself". She did not consider that such campaigns needed to target her; rather, she said, they needed to reach people like her boyfriend.

Finally, where campaign messages clearly and specifically address their own potentially dangerous behaviour, they rationalise them away. David, for example, talks about the "every K over" anti-speeding advertisements: "when you're driving between cities and there's not one car for kilometres [and where he routinely speeds], I just, yeah, I figure that it's 110". (Queensland highway limits are 100kph.) As he has already explained, he has strategies for combining speed with "safety": clearly, the "every K over" message does not apply to him.

Conclusions

The young drivers interviewed, represented here by Amy and David, take up a range of discourses from mainstream culture--masculinist discourses of mastery and technique and, to a lesser extent (and subordinate to them), feminine discourses of caring--in constructing both driving, and themselves as drivers. They all drive dangerously, yet all see themselves as good drivers. They are able to do so by rationalising any inconsistencies between their self-perceptions and their driving practices through a number of discursive moves. Consequently, they are able to ignore road safety messages directed at them and their behaviours by seeing them as not applying to them.

This type of analysis suggests two potentially fruitful strategies for campaigns to promote safer driving in young people. First, social marketing campaigns might make more visible to young people the contradictions and the competing values and understandings of "good driving" that young people draw on in their self-constructions and their constructions of their behaviour. Second, the focus of campaigns could be widened beyond the immediate targets of young people and the behaviours that are of immediate concern to address broader cultural factors, including the links between youth, gender, "fun" and dangerous driving, which are still widely promoted through advertising.

As I noted at the outset, this study drew on only a small group of young people. These young rural university college residents certainly could not be considered representative of young people more generally. Moreover, this paper does not include comparable data for other groups--urban youth, young men and women of different cultural backgrounds, those with more limited education, or adult drivers, for example--or in relation to other aspects of these young people's behaviour. The study therefore does not address the issues of whether the same strategies are used by all young people, whether these strategies are restricted to young people or how they might be used by young people in relation to other aspects of their behaviour. Despite these limitations, this methodology may have wider application for "getting at" how young people (and, perhaps, not so young people) make sense of themselves, their world and their behaviour, how they take up discourses available in the wider culture and make them their own, and how they are able to "ward off" messages intended to encourage them to change their behaviour.

Note

The research that this paper is based on was approved by the James Cook University Ethics Committee (Human Research Subcommittee), approval H1566. The research was an unfunded pilot study.

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Malcolm Vick is a senior lecturer in the School of Education at James Cook University in Queensland.