Abstract

According to the WHO, Thailand has the second most dangerous roads in the world over 2600 children die and more than 72 000 are injured on Thailand’s roads every year. However, only 7% of children wear helmets when riding motorcycles, even when their parents do. The 7% Project, in partnership of Save the Children Thailand and the Asia Injury Prevention (AIP) Foundation that focuses on behavior influence strategies, education, and enforcement to increase helmet use and helmet-wearing awareness among children, ultimately decreasing the number of road crash injuries and fatalities across Thailand. In collaboration with Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA), The 7% Project aims to implement its education component on Behavior Influence (BI) activities for student helmet use promotion in 6 pilot schools while monitoring the helmet use situations in other 6 control schools. Therefore, Save the Children International has supported the ThaiRoads Foundation to conduct student helmet use observation at those 12 schools for use as a baseline information as well as monitoring the project progress. In this study, the Quasi-Experimental Designs was use to evaluate the effect of the educational campaign for student helmet use promotion under The 7% Project, using the survey data at pilot and control schools from May to November 2015. The result suggests that during the monitoring periods, the educational campaign could lead to a relative increase in student helmet use rates that could be as high as 133% in September 2015. However, the use of data from the fourth or final observation in November 2015 reveals a significant decline in the estimated effect of behavior influence activities to 45%, suggesting that further student helmet use observations would be necessary to examine the sustainability of the effect.