For this installment of Stories from the Field, UC Berkeley SafeTREC’s Kris Leckie chatted with Dr. Kari Finley, Director and Research Scholar at Montana State University’s Center for Health and Safety Culture. In this conversation, she talks to us about her work to create a culture that supports and values all road users and meets the needs of everyone. Read her Safety Story below!
Do you mind telling us about your center and the role you play within it?
Dr. Kari Finley: At the Center for Health and Safety Culture at Montana State University, we are an interdisciplinary team of researchers dedicated to understanding how culture influences health and safety. We work in partnership with communities, states, and national organizations to foster positive cultural change to support health and safety.
I am a Research Scholar and the Director of the Center. My research focuses on traffic safety, child wellness, and substance misuse. Through my research, I am interested in exploring how beliefs influence behavior change. My goal is to use that understanding to support communities in creating environments where positive and healthy behaviors are supported and sustained.
What inspires your work in health and safety culture?
KF: When I reflect on the complex public health challenges we face today, it’s clear that meaningful solutions require collaboration across disciplines and stakeholder groups. I’m passionate about building partnerships to foster healthy and safe cultures. I’m continually inspired by the opportunity to learn from others and to work together toward shared goals.
How is the Center for Health and Safety Culture working to prioritize the safety of people walking, biking, and rolling?
KF: At the Center for Health and Safety Culture, we are committed to advancing safety for all road users. While building safe infrastructure for people walking and biking is essential, it’s only part of the solution. Lasting change also requires cultivating beliefs that support a shared transportation system where everyone’s safety is a priority. Our goal is to help create a culture that supports and values all road users and a thriving transportation system that meets the needs of everyone.
Your center uses a cultural approach to improve health and safety. What does that look like?
KF: At the Center for Health and Safety Culture, we think of culture as the shared beliefs of a group of people that influence behaviors. So, when we talk about using a cultural approach, we’re really talking about focusing on growing shared beliefs that support protective behaviors and decrease risky behaviors.
What that looks like in practice is seeking first to understand the shared beliefs people have. For example, we might explore how people perceive risk associated with driving under the influence of alcohol, or how the beliefs of pedestrian safety stakeholders influence the implementation of best practices in pedestrian safety, or how norms within a workplace shape whether safety practices are followed or enforced. From there, we work with our community partners to implement strategies that build on existing positive and protective beliefs that support the health and safety behaviors we are seeking to grow. That might look like implementing strategies that increase risk perceptions, close misperception gaps, or amplify the positive norm.
We approach our work using a framework we’ve developed called the Positive Culture Framework. The Positive Culture Framework provides a process to help reveal and grow positive, shared beliefs and to cultivate health and safety across all layers of the social environment, including individuals, families, schools, workplaces, and the community.
Can you talk a bit about the move from traffic safety culture to a positive traffic safety culture?
KF: Every community has a traffic safety culture. That culture includes the shared beliefs that influence how people behave. But not all traffic safety culture is positive. In some situations, the prevailing culture might normalize risky behaviors, like speeding, distracted driving, or not yielding to pedestrians. So, when we talk about the move toward a positive traffic safety culture, we’re talking about intentionally shifting those shared beliefs to support safer behaviors. At the Center, we do not only focus on driver behaviors but also the actions and behaviors of other stakeholders and those around the driver across the social ecology.
At the Center for Health and Safety Culture, we define positive culture as a culture that supports healthy and safe behaviors. It’s about focusing on and growing the strengths that already exist within a community. For example, if most drivers in a community already believe in the importance of getting home safely, we can amplify those positive beliefs and connect them directly to safer behaviors, like never driving after drinking alcohol or always wearing a seat belt.
Moving to a positive traffic safety culture is about being intentional in our work by understanding the culture that exists, identifying where it supports or hinders safety, and then working collaboratively to strengthen the beliefs and values that promote safer behavior for everyone.
We recently held a webinar on how to build and strengthen a positive traffic safety culture in communities across California. I’d love to know, what advice would you give someone who wants to start this work in their own community?
KF: I recommend approaching your community from a lens that the positive exists and is worth growing. Approaching your work from a positive lens doesn’t mean that you ignore or minimize the harms or risks that your community faces, but it does mean that you start from a place that honors and values the good that is already there. Starting from this place cultivates hope and inspires others to join your efforts.
In the past few years, the Safe System Approach to road safety has been widely adopted and we now have useful frameworks like Ederer et. al’s Safe System Pyramid to guide and inform the implementation of active transportation policies, programs, and practices that impact public health at the population level. This might include focusing on upstream strategies such as improving road design, lowering speed limits, and zoning reforms. How do you see something like the Safe System Pyramid interacting with the Traffic Safety Culture primer? How can they work together to help us achieve safer walking, biking and rolling for all?
KF: The Traffic Safety Culture Primer compliments the Safe System Approach and the Safe System Pyramid because it discusses the role of traffic safety culture in creating safe systems to support a vision of zero traffic fatalities and serious injuries. For example, the Safe System Approach focuses on recognizing the importance of building a transportation system that supports safety. However, to fully embrace the Safe System Approach, we need a supportive culture that values and prioritizes safety and shared responsibility.
That’s where focusing on traffic safety culture comes in. Traffic safety culture helps us to understand the shared beliefs that influence how people perceive and respond to those system-level changes. For example, lowering speed limits or implementing traffic calming strategies may be effective, but whether those changes are accepted within a community depends on the prevailing culture. Focusing on traffic safety culture can help us better understand those shared beliefs and ways to bolster the conditions for those strategies to be embraced.
If you had a superpower and could change anything, what would the future of active transportation safety look like?
KF: If I had a superpower, it would be the ability to instantly change or adapt the transportation system to meet the needs of any road user. This superpower would allow for both motorized and non-motorized road users to access and use the transportation system optimally. It would instantly create a shared system that meets the needs of everyone at any time. People would have access to the places they need access to and arrive safely, no matter their mode of transportation.
This Stories From the Field interview was conducted in collaboration with UC Berkeley SafeTREC. The opinions and perspectives expressed are those of the interviewee and not necessarily those of SafeTREC or the Office of Traffic Safety.
Funding is provided by a grant from the California Office of Traffic Safety (OTS) through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
