Revealing the unspoken: drunk driving behavior of Vietnamese students

The increasing rate of alcohol related traffic accidents, especially among adolescents, has become a major safety concern. While numerous studies have examined drunk driving among young people using direct questioning methods, such behaviors are often viewed as sensitive, increasing the risk of underreporting. This work is to examine the actual prevalence of misreporting regarding drunk driving and riding with a drunk driver, while accounting for potential misreporting bias.

The study employed a list experiment, an indirect questioning technique, on a sample of 615 undergraduates in Vietnam.

Our findings reveal that the prevalence of drunk driving among male students is nearly three times higher when measured using the list experiment compared to direct questioning. Furthermore, students from single-parent or parentless households exhibit considerably greater misreporting bias and a higher prevalence of drunk driving than those from families with both parents.

This study suggests that list experiments are an appropriate and effective method for estimating the prevalence of sensitive alcohol consumption-related travel behaviors.