The Revision Of Multidimensional Driving Style Inventory And The Association With Drivers’ Emotion Styles

Driving style refers to the habitual way of driving in daily life. It differs from one toanother, and has tremendous impact on driving behavior and traffic safety. Therefore, thispaper conducted two studies, testing the reliability, validity and applicability of the revisedversion of Multidimensional Driving Style Inventory (MDSI-C) in study1and examining theeffects of emotion types on driving styles in study2. The results are as following:655drivers from20major cities participated and completed the MDSI in study1. Afteritem analysis, EFA and CFA, we got the final version of MDSI-C. MDSI-C consisted of24items, which was divided into5factors, namely sensation seeking, angry, anxious, risky anddissociative driving style. The factors’ ratio of cumulative contribution was54.27%,indicating that it had good construct validity. Pearson correlations between the factors and thewhole inventory were from0.60to0.77, all ps<0.001.The Cronbach’s α of the wholeinventory was0.86, and0.82,0.75,0.73,0.72,0.70for the factors, respectively.By combining sensation seeking and risky driving style, we got risky driving style. Bycombining anxious and dissociative driving style, we got anxious driving style. And the thirddriving style is angry driving style itself. All the three driving styles are mal-adaptive drivingstyle, which have direct association with traffic violations. Therefore, both the reliability andvalidity of MDSI-C met the criteria of psychometrics, and it can be used as a tool to assessChinese drivers’ driving styles in the future researches.In study2,188drivers completed the MDSI-C and Drivers’ Profile of Mood State(DPMS) at the same time, in order to explore the most powerful predictable factors of eachdriving style.Firstly, the angry, anxious and depression dimensions of DPMS have positivecorrelations with all the styles of MDSI-C, the energy dimension only have weak correlationswith dissociative driving style. Secondly, the main effect of demographic factors and differentemotion types, and their interactions, can explain a total of33.2%of the variance in sensationseeking driving style,39.6%in angry driving style,29.9%in risky driving style,37.8%inanxious driving style and42.2%in dissociative driving style. Thirdly, the main effect ofdemographic factors and different emotion types, and their interactions, can explain a total of31.8%of the variance in risky driving style,37.5%in angry driving style and43.1%inanxious driving style.To sum up, the most powerful predictable demographic factors are gender and drivingexposure, the emotion factors are angry and anxious mood style.