How you'll know if an outcome has been successful

Before you start, you'll need to state how you're going to measure your outcomes.

Understanding outcomes is important

When you’re delivering a road safety intervention, you need to know why you’re doing it and what you want to achieve. After all, there are lots of reasons why you might be undertaking an intervention in the first place.

Here, we’ll take a look at some of the likely reasons. Plus, we’ll see how they might relate to other factors. This will also give you a useful framework for setting your outcomes.

Reasons for delivering a road safety intervention

  • As the result of an incident in the local community, such as a fatal road accident
  • You might be designing an initiative around a specific type of behaviour
  • Your intervention might be focused on a specific risk, like speeding or drug driving
  • Or, it could be aligned with other aims, like personal health and wellbeing

How many risks should you deal with?

It can be difficult to decide whether to deal with different risks in a short time, or focus on just one or two. It’s usually better to focus on a smaller number in more detail, rather than cover a range of topics at a superficial level.

Relating your outcome

Your outcome will be directly related to your Young Driver Intervention aims and objectives.

That’s why it’s so important to clearly define your aims and objectives, as they help to determine the outcome. 

By defining the outcome, you’ll also be supporting your Young Driver Intervention evaluation because you now have something to measure.

SMART goal setting framework

Using this can help you to set the goals for your driver intervention.

Specific

  • Have a particular thing in mind that you want to target

Measurable

  • Is it easy to measure?

Achievable

  • Don’t set yourself an impossible task

Realistic

  • Is the intervention likely to achieve this goal?

Timely

  • When do you want change to happen?

Using an example to understand the outcome

‘This intervention aims to support high levels of seat belt use by reinforcing the importance of wearing seat belts and legitimising enforcement with young people’.

The intervention could be designed in various ways to achieve this aim, but the outcomes are ‘importance of seat belt use’ and ‘legitimising enforcement’.

So, the intervention is not aiming to increase seat belt use directly. It’s aiming to support the current high-levels of seat belt use, so that new drivers continue to use them.

These outcomes are both realistic and measurable, with a well-designed Young Driver Interventions evaluation.

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