Evaluation of the traffic safety campaign „Play it safe and stay alive'

The objective of the present article is to describe and evaluate a pilot traffic safety project, “Live to Be Twenty”, run by the Kolečko endowment fund and its partners. Targeted at students in the 17-19 age category, the project was carried out from September 2015 to June 2016 at selected secondary schools, including grammar schools, in the Central Bohemia and Ústí nad Labem regions. The paper provides an outline of the basic concepts concerning the raising of public awareness of traffic safety-related issues, particularly as regards adolescents’ risk-taking behaviour and their specific personality aspects and the ways in which the environment may influence their thinking and behaviour. General statistics showing the rates of injuries among children and adolescents are also provided. The main focus of the article is on prevention and traffic education, with a view to the secondary school context, and the young people’s readiness to provide first aid. In addition, the paper examines thoroughly the effectiveness of the project and the degree of its effect on its participants. It seeks to establish to what extent the project may have influenced the thinking, attitudes, and behaviour of the young people who participated in it. The evaluation study was intended to answer the questions of whether and to what extent the project had an impact on the students (and for how long). The results suggest that the project had a significant effect on the students’ attitudes and their readiness to provide first aid. However, this effect was short-lived: no effect was demonstrated at a three-month follow-up. In conclusion, the findings are, used to recommend changes for the future implementation of the project, including the better practical utilisation of the experience and results generated by the project and incorporating the project into a long-term and systematic policy covering the school-based prevention of risk behaviour.