Evaluation of the Isolated Effects of a Seat-Belt Campaign in Belgium

Abstract

Campaigns and Awareness-raising Strategies in Traffic Safety (CAST) is a targeted research project supported by the European Commission. It was set up to meet the Commission’s need to enhance traffic safety by means of effective road safety campaigns. The CAST project covered the period from 2006 to 2009, and was geared to fulfil the need for tools among campaign practitioners. CAST has developed two such tools to help practitioners design and evaluate road safety campaigns. The design tool contains detailed guidelines for designing and implementing a campaign, based on both existing research and new results produced by the CAST project. The evaluation tool is aimed at helping users conduct the best evaluations, ones that are tailored to the specific characteristics of each road safety campaign and are well-suited to assessing the campaign’s effectiveness. With these two tools, practitioners can accurately evaluate their campaigns and also ensure that new campaigns will be planned and executed in a way that will have the optimal impact. The CAST project was carried out by a consortium of 19 partners and coordinated by the Belgian Road Safety Institute (IBSR-BIVV). It included all of the major European organisations with skills and experience in the area of road safety campaigns, bringing together expertise from throughout the EU.