Crossing a road is a common challenge faced by adults and children alike. It’s a routine activity, but one that must be learned and practiced. Getting it right is a matter of life and death. 

Despite the critical role that parents play in teaching kids how to safely cross roads, almost nothing is known about how parents and children interact when approaching this crucial task. A new University of Iowa (UI) research study aims to shed light on parent-child road crossing behaviors and, ultimately, to help lead to changes that reduce motor vehicle collisions with pedestrians, a major cause of childhood death and disability.

The new $600,000 grant from the National Science Foundation has been awarded to UI faculty researchers Jodie Plumert (PI), professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Elizabeth O’Neal (Co-PI), assistant professor in the Department of Community and Behavioral Health, and Joseph Kearney (Co-PI), professor emeritus in the Department of Computer Science.

The study will focus on parents and their children, aged 6 to 8 years old, as they tackle two common road-crossing hazards: deciding whether an approaching vehicle intends to yield and deciding when to cross a stream of continuous traffic. The research will be conducted in a virtual environment at the University of Iowa’s Hank Virtual Environments Laboratory in the Department of Computer Science, as well as in naturalistic environments.   

“The goal of this project is to better understand how individual differences in parents’ risk-taking impacts children’s injury risk when crossing roads with traffic,” explains O’Neal. “We’ll first observe how parents cross roads on their own, without any children present, to assess their level of risk tolerance. Next, we’ll observe parents and children crossing together to see how the parent’s approach to crossing roads on their own impacts the way they teach their child to cross roads. Finally, we’ll assess how children’s experiences during joint road crossing with a parent impact their independent road crossing behaviors.” 

The individual road crossing observations will be conducted in a virtual environment, says O’Neal, but recently developed wearable instrumentation will be used by the researchers to record parent-child interactions in real-world road crossing situations as well.

“Venturing from the laboratory to the natural environment will enrich our understanding of how parents approach teaching children complex, everyday skills, and allow us to determine the extent to which behavior in the laboratory corresponds to that in the natural environment,” says O’Neal.