TUTOR: Well, good afternoon. In today's session John Upton will be sharing some of the findings of his research project from last term. John...

JOHN: Thanks. Well, first of all, a little bit about the background to the project. Our title, as you can see, is pretty straightforward: ‘car safety’. But these days there's a lot more to it than the usual injunctions about drinking and driving or speeding. I had been interested and horrified by several newspaper reports on what people call ‘road rage’. For example the famous incident of a man getting out of his car in a car park and hitting the driver of a van who had overtaken him earlier. It seemed to me that there were almost as many serious problems when cars were parked...i.e. were stationary...as when they were travelling at 90 miles an hour. So I decided to make this the focus of the project.

For our research we depended mainly on talking to individuals, asking them questions rather than using written questionnaires. We stopped people at a selected garage on the motorway over a two-day period, and asked them questions about what they'd observed or experienced themselves.