Injury and Violence Prevention: Behavioral Science Theories, Methods, and Applications

For almost three-quarters of a century, Public Health Reports (PHR) has served as a main organ for program updates on unintentional injury and violence as the leading cause of death for Americans. PHR has reflected the then-current paradigms for leadership in injury prevention and control. In the 1940s, the somewhat misguided human-factors school of “accident-proness” (started by the industrial safety movement a few decades earlier on psychological motivations as the primary cause of accidents) passionately advocated injury prevention that was exclusive of any environment or consumer products kinetic energy gone wrong. A 1949 PHR published symposium called for critical analysis of the public health implications for such a thesis that detection and psychoanalysis of particular configurations was the cause and prevention of “accidents.”¹ By the 1950s, human-factor whims of causes and their prevention predominated from various Kellogg Foundation-funded demonstration programs to state and local health departments.^2–6 From the 1960s, when I started in injury control, into the mid–70s, Public Health Service's nexus of environment-human factors prism was still on nonreproducible human-factors causes and prevention.^7–8 But that national thrust slowly dissolved to a more balanced injury-control effort under William Haddon, Jr., the father of modern injury-control epidemiology and the first director of the present National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, who forced the automobile industry forward on safety designs and regulations.

Subsequently, and still today, some non-evidence-based human-factors research and programming includes very expensive, ineffective public announcements separated from any real tested, community-based, controlled interventions. The earlier ineffective human-factors school lives on and its workers need this book!

Today, however, newer achievements in modern behavioral sciences from this fine book offer a new bedrock for injury prevention and control research, practice, teaching, and public advocacy leadership, yet awaiting a full descriptive, analytical, and dynamic historical leadership archetypes system.

The book, written by a wonderful collaboration of behavioral experts, serves as an admirable seminal contribution for primary linking and institutionalizing key components of the behavioral sciences to the predominant, only partial injury-control system focus on product and environmental injury prevention and control. Many clear models, examples, and applications are cited in Chapter 3 and throughout the book. Chapter 17, a timely chapter on youth violence, served as a linchpin for my response to a local media enquiry on school safety.

As an injury-control historian, I particularly liked the review in Part One, Chapter 1, p. 4, “Gibson to Haddon, the father of modern injury-control linkage of disciplines of engineering and medicine.” The authors also successfully linked on the modern behavior disciplines for the injury-control field (Part One, Chapter 5, p. 88) to Part Two, the somewhat briefly cited Haddon, Suchman, and Klein's attack on then-weak control research methods and studies on accidents that included human factors. In Parts Two and Three, those new-generation methods are cited.

Still, much of the dangerous, non-evidence-based injury historical failures of the decades-long “accident-prone school” remains to be told, and its lessons linked to the historiography of modern leadership paradigms. Lessons can still be learned from prior workers' leadership difficulties on doing their research, practice, and advocacy to guide current challenges. That is my own narrow critique of this fine work.

Indeed, in Part Four, Chapter 22, “The past reflects the challenges of the present,” and elsewhere in the book are broad and pioneering views of the injury-control field and the role of human factors that should kindle a much-needed new spirit and action for the field's systems, collaborations, and shared vision leadership during expected times of less national and state resources.