Groups of interest:
‘Offenders’ *
Rather than a specific subgroup of
individuals, your chosen target group
may be mobile phone using drivers more
generally.
If your data is derived from statistics about people
breaking the 2003 mobile phone law, it may cause you
to miss a large group of people that are driving while
distracted by their phone, just not in ways covered
by the law. Assuming that we share the ultimate aim
of reducing road death and injury, and that we are
not just interested in prosecutions, then we shouldn’t
be overlooking any groups of potentially dangerous
drivers.
We also need to think creatively about the laws that we
can use to make our point, and not be limited to what
the specific law against mobile phone use allows us to
do.
And, whilst the focus may be on offenders, that doesn’t
mean that we should only think about methods of
enforcement. There are many ways that we can engage
with this group, including prosecution and education,
and all methods of interacting with offenders can be
adopted in more (and less) effective ways.
*As you’ll have gathered by now, we mean phone users
generally, not just ones that break the 2003 law against
using a handheld phone whilst driving
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