Psychometric Evaluation of the Safe Road-crossing Behaviors Scale: A Study among Iranian University Students

Millions of pedestrians are seriously injured, disabled, or lose their lives in road traffic accidents annually. The availability of a standard scale specifically for predicting road-crossing behaviors would be beneficial in research applications and in tailoring interventions. The purpose of the current research was to psychometrically evaluate the safe road-crossing behaviors scale based on the Prototype Willingness Model (PWM) among college students. In this cross-sectional study, a purposive and multi-stage sampling method was used to select 315 students from Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences (KUMS) during 2018. The studied social-cognitive determinants from the PWM included attitude, subjective norms, prototype, intention, and willingness. Participants completed a written self-report questionnaire. Data was analyzed using SPSS (ver. 20.0). Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) with VARIMAX rotation was applied to determine the number and composition of constructs. Five factors were extracted. The calculated Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) value was 0.806. Overall, the PWM constructs explained 64.39% of the variance in the hypothesized model. Cronbach’s alpha for the measured constructs of attitude, subjective norms, prototype, intention, and willingness were 0.87, 0.81, 0.68, 0.71, and 0.61, respectively. The present study provides some support from among students at an Iranian university for the internal validity and reliability of the safe road-crossing behaviors scale. This scale could be used in planning interventions for the promotion of safe road-crossing behaviors among pedestrians.