Challenges and opportunities for promoting booster seat use: progressive dissemination of a high-threat message.

Motivating parents to take certain safety precautions when traveling with their children remains challenging for advocates. Caregivers of booster-aged children are particularly difficult to reach because they do not consider their children to be of "safety-seat" age and have inherently low perceptions of vulnerability to crash injury. Unfortunately, most booster seat programs fail to adequately motivate their intended population because they are primarily informational in nature and rely on caregivers to seek out and attend to the information.

Measuring injury risk perceptions: feasibility of a Risk Estimation Scale.

Objectives: To develop a scale for measuring parental perceptions of childhood injury risk.

Methods: The Worry Assessment and Risk Estimation (WARE) Scale was administered to 256 parents/guardians to examine reliability, factor structure, and perception of risk.

Results: The WARE Scale has high internal consistency reliability (alpha = .

Evaluation of the Boost 'em in the Back Seat Program: using fear and efficacy to increase booster seat use.

Objectives: Recent research supports the use of high-threat messages when they are targeted appropriately and designed to promote high efficacy as well as fear. This research examined the effectiveness of using a novel threat-appeal approach to encourage parents to place their children in booster seats and rear seats of vehicles.

Method: A 6-min video-intervention was created and evaluated at after-school/daycare centers via an interrupted time series design with similar control sites for comparison.