In an effort to achieve greater consistency and comparability in state-wide seat belt use reporting, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued requirements in 2011 for observing and reporting future seat belt use. The requirements included the involvement of a qualified statistician in the sampling and weighting portions of the process as well as a variety of operational details.
The Iowa Governor’s Traffic Safety Bureau contracted with CSSM/SRS in 2011 to develop the study design and data collection plan for the State of Iowa’s annual survey that would meet the new requirements of the NHTSA. A seat belt survey plan for Iowa was developed by CSSM/SRS with statistical expertise provided by Zhengyuan Zhu, Ph.D., Professor of Statistics at Iowa State University and Director of CSSM. The plan was approved by NHTSA on March 19, 2012 and implemented for five years, in the summers of 2012-2016.
As required by NHTSA, the Iowa plan was revised in the fall of 2016 and in 2021. Dr. Emily Berg, Assistant Professor of Statistics at Iowa State University, followed the protocol of the approved plan and redrew the counties and road segments to be used for future data collection.