DAAG (version 1.17)

nassCDS: Airbag and other influences on accident fatalities

Description

US data, for 1997-2002, from police-reported car crashes in which there is a harmful event (people or property), and from which at least one vehicle was towed. Data are restricted to front-seat occupants, include only a subset of the variables recorded, and are restricted in other ways also.

Usage

nassCDS

source

http://www.stat.uga.edu/~mmeyer/airbags.htm

ftp://ftp.nhtsa.dot.gov/nass/

See also http://www.maths.anu.edu.au/~johnm/datasets/airbags

Details

Data collection used a multi-stage probabilistic sampling scheme. The observation weight, called national inflation factor (national) in the data from NASS, is the inverse of an estimate of the selection probability. These data include a subset of the variables from the NASS dataset. Variables that are coded here as factors are coded as numeric values in that dataset.

References

Meyer, M.C. and Finney, T. (2005): Who wants airbags?. Chance 18:3-16.

Farmer, C.H. 2006. Another look at Meyer and Finney's Who wants airbags?. Chance 19:15-22.

Meyer, M.C. 2006. Commentary on "Another look at Meyer and Finney's Who wants airbags?. Chance 19:23-24.

For analyses based on the alternative FARS (Fatal Accident Recording System) data, and associated commentary, see:

Cummings, P; McKnight, B, 2010. Accounting for vehicle, crash, and occupant characteristics in traffic crash studies. Injury Prevention 16: 363-366. [The relatively definitive analyses in this paper use a matched cohort design,

Olson, CM; Cummings, P, Rivara, FP, 2006. Association of first- and second-generation air bags with front occupant death in car crashes: a matched cohort study. Am J Epidemiol 164:161-169. [The relatively definitive analyses in this paper use a matched cohort design, using data taken from the FARS (Fatal Accident Recording System) database.]

Braver, ER; Shardell, M; Teoh, ER, 2010. How have changes in air bag designs affected frontal crash mortality? Ann Epidemiol 20:499-510.

The web page http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx has a menu-based interface into the FARS (Fatality Analysis Recording System) data. The FARS database aims to include every accident in which there was at least one fatality.

Examples

data(nassCDS)
xtabs(weight ~ dead + airbag, data=nassCDS)
xtabs(weight ~ dead + airbag + seatbelt + dvcat, data=nassCDS)
tab <- xtabs(weight ~ dead + abcat, data=nassCDS,
             subset=dvcat=="25-39"&frontal==0)[, c(3,1,2)]
round(tab[2, ]/apply(tab,2,sum)*100,2)