Improving Older Drivers’ Behaviors Using Theory of Planned Behavior
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Line 39 - Missing reference for the statistics
Line 41 - Seems like a huge jump of increase among older drivers. Please provide reference or the reason to see such a jump.
Line 44 - Please revise and state what risks. Overall, in life or in terms of driving? I see that these risks are elaborated in the following sentences. But the sentence might need restructuring.
Line 44: The main factors “that” affect …. Sentence grammar revise.
Line 45: Revise grammar
Line 46-49: Missing references
Line 53: What is blinking and closing eyes? Is that a condition?
Line 51-66: Difficult to read and follow because grammatically incorrect sentence structure. Please revise sentence and paragraph flow.
Line 67: Line repeated from first para.
Line 67-104: Unfortunately, there are too many grammatical and sentence structure issues to read. Please revise the introduction.
Line 106-113: Revise grammar.
Line 131: What does conflict of behavior mean?
Line 135: Did the emergency situations have any traffic lights? So here the emergency situation was that the truck would drive out and potentially cause the driver to crash into it? What if the driver crashes? If this is an incorrect assumption, please describe this emergency situation a little more clearly to better understand the setup.
Line 172: What does it mean to record actual driving mileage? Isn’t it just self-reported driving mileage? Actual sounds like the driver’s mileage could be verified in some way, which is probably not the case.
Line 175: What is a physiological psychology instrument and how was it adjusted and why? Do not see this explained anywhere prior to this line.
Line 179: Very vague explanation of what the authors mean by this - “and ensure that the instrument was working properly after the pre-experiment”. What instrument and what does it mean to work properly and why after the testing phase?
Line 185: What does it mean to check for validity - “Each diver’s data was checked for validity”?
Line 185-186: How many had to repeat and wouldn’t this bias the driver’s knowledge of the study and training if they repeated and why or how would the data be deemed invalid?
The experimental setup section attempts to explain parts of the study that are only elaborated later in the Method’s section. Suggest revising the order or explaining both sections. For example, Line 190 mentions the Ergo LAB instrument which is only further explained in Line 210.
Across the entire paper - spell checks, grammar, and sentence structure need to be closely assessed as it is hard to read.
Line 194: There is no participant data in the table - “The data in Table 1 include all participants those who have attended the training drive and not”.
Line 210-212: “Ergo LAB physiological psychological instrument and IView HED4 eye tracker information is insufficient to help the reader understand how these instruments function. A paragraph for each of the instruments, its specs, validity, etc. needs to be included to help readers determine what exactly is being recorded.
PNE Model: Completely unclear what this model is, is this an established model, what is its theoretical background, why is it included, what does it represent, has it been used before, etc. Just seems like it suddenly shows up in the paper without any outline of why the model is being used. Suggest introducing training in the introduction if the goal is to use a training model. Also there is no reference of previous work using PNE so it seems too left field in terms of paper flow and the goal of the paper.
Line 244: Nowhere does the paper reflect that a PNE training system was the goal. But it surfaces randomly in this line. Overall, it doesn’t help the reader get an idea of why the TPB model is being used to develop a PNE training system and to what purpose? What exactly then is the goal of this study?
Line 245: Suggests that the PNE system was already created? What is it and why is there no explanation of its use?
Lines 242-284: While many of the sections are lacking detailed explanation, the TPB is very detailed and unnecessary because it is an established and widely used model and approach that does not need any mathematical equations to represent it. It is unclear if this section is explaining anything new about TPB aside from what is already known. If the authors want to keep the section, then one suggestion is to at least showcase the equations with the actual variables being used in the study vs. the generic variables.
Line 285-290: Under what assumptions, validation, and criteria is the training model factors for perceived, norm, and execute tied to attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control? It seems that a connection is being made between the training model and TPB without any explanation or validation.
Line 293-320: SEM is a well-established approach. It does not need a generic explanation. Similar to the authors explanation of TPB, if they would like to keep this section one suggestion is to revise the equations to include the variables being used in the study.
Line 344: Table 4 shows variables. Among these, score of driving behavior is not explained anywhere as to how it was calculated. Scores vary from study to study so please showcase any new metrics such as scores that are being used in this study.
Line 352: Most studies showcase either in the results and methods section the distribution of the driver sample collected either by age or age groups or gender. This is missing and makes it hard to interpret whether the results have value for certain types of drivers, age groups, gender, etc. Kindly add summary statistics of the drivers recruited for the study.
Line 358: Table 5 does not make any sense. Simply stating yes and no to reflect differences is very meaningless. How were the differences determined, what statistical tests were conducted to reflect these differences, what is the significance of these differences, etc.
Line 358-378: Strongly recommend revising this and to showcase actual numbers and statistical testing differences when reporting such things in the results section.
Line 381: Not sure where this was explained before. How were the metrics for this criteria measures, collected, assessed? “driving performance, based on three criteria: security, comfort, and time spent on driving performance indicators”.
Line 387: Confused here. In the results section Table 5 compared across different age groups but then table 6 only focuses on older drivers. There should be consistency on what is being compared and shown. Suddenly focusing on older drivers seems like there was no point in collecting data from other age groups.
Line 390: Provide reference for the software tool used.
Line 391: States that the model was modified but no explanation on how and why.
Line 396-413: It seems like although Figure 6 provides a lot of results, the actual explanation of the results is missing. Apart from just reflecting that age had an impact all the other variables recorded for this study has been ignored. Overall, the results section in total is very incomplete.
Line 415-477: While I see this section has a lot of information, it seems like all the variables were just quickly compared with 2 lines per variables vs. an actual discussion of what the takeaway of the results were. Cannot gather takeaway from this section the way it is written. Suggest reading papers with discussion sections and focusing on takeaways that the reader can use.
Line 478-497: Similar feedback, the discussion section is written well but it reads more like results vs. actual discussion on what these results mean to the goal of the study.
Line 506: Disagree that training can remove the negative impact of age. Remove is a strong word to use given that the research community has worked on many aspects of training and found little to no benefits to training. This does not mean that the findings don’t have value. It is important in this paper to reflect what has been found and relate the findings back to the wider research and reflect how these findings fit, or question past work.
Missing: All studies, analyses, and approaches have limitations. Kindly add a paragraph to reflect on what are the limitations of this work vs. a single line (line 525) in the conclusion.
Author Response
Dear reviewer:
I have uploaded the file with response and manuscript. Please see the attachment.
Thank you, best regards!
Author: Dingan Ni
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
In this paper, the authors adopted the theory of planned behaviour to construct a driving behaviour enhancement training model for older drivers. They develop a structural equation model to comprehend the relationship between training level, driver characteristics, and traffic safety. The results showed that the training can counteract the effect of the driver’s ageing on the characteristics of driving behaviour and that older drivers tend to lower their dangerous driving tendency. This paper is well structured and interesting for the audience.
Author Response
Dear Editor,
We would like to thank you very much for your help in handling our paper. We would also like to thank the reviewers for their valuable time in providing constructive feedback. Thank you once again, and your support is greatly appreciated.
Sincerely,
Yours,
Dingan Ni
Fengxiang Guo
Reviewer 3 Report
No issues were found.
Author Response
Dear Editor,
We would like to thank you very much for your help in handling our paper. We would also like to thank the reviewers for their valuable time in providing constructive feedback. Thank you once again, and your support is greatly appreciated.
Sincerely,
Yours,
Dingan Ni
Fengxiang Guo
