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The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which parents intend to place driving limits on adolescents approaching unsupervised driving. A total of 658 parents and their 16-year-old adolescents were recruited from a local Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration site as adolescents successfully tested for provisional licenses. Parents completed written surveys about parent-adolescent relations and anticipated adolescent unsupervised driving. The results indicated that parents reported high levels of intended limits on adolescents’ unsupervised driving, especially for trip conditions (e.g., getting permission) when compared with risk conditions (e.g., at night). Almost one third of parents reported completing driving agreements. Overall, intended driving limits and completed driving agreements were more likely when parents reported high levels of parental monitoring (2 times more likely), discussion of driving rules (2 to 4 times more likely), risk perception (2 times more likely), and vehicle access (2 to 3 times more likely). Completed driving agreements were not related to intended driving limits.

An analysis is presented of adolescent driving risk, the advantages of graduated licensing programs, and the potential for parent-based programs to moderate teen driving risks. Risk factors associated with youthful driving illustrate the potential importance and benefits of limiting the amount and conditions under which teens can drive. State policies, such as graduated driver licensing systems that formalize restrictions on youthful driving, have been shown to be effective. However, teen driving risks remain elevated. Parents are in a prime position to extend the benefits of state restrictions by developing and implementing their own tailored family policies on adolescent driving. Unfortunately, parents of adolescent drivers are often under-aware of the need to do so and fail to impose effective driving restrictions. An ongoing parent-based intervention to increase parental restriction on teen driving is described, and issues involved in implementing and evaluating family-centered approaches to reduce teen driving risk are raised.

The effects of health threat communications have generated considerable empirical and theoretical attention. Inconsistent findings in the "fear appeat' literature suggest that the effects of these types of messages are not completely understood. Previous theoretical approaches have tended to focus upon the emotional (fear) reaction produced by exposure to threatening health information. However, the weight of the experimental evidence indicates that certain cognitions about the threat are more directly related to acceptance of the recommendations than emotional arousal. An integration of the existing theoretical approaches is offered, which views acceptance of health threat recommendations to be mediated by perceptions of threat control. Two fundamental beliefs are seen as comprising perceived threat control: response efficacy, which is the perceived ability of the recommended coping action(s) to reduce or control the threat; and personal efficacy, which is the person's expectation of being able to perform the recommended threat-coping action(s) successfully. These two threat controlfactors are consistent with existing theories of health behavior (Health Belief Model) and fear appeals (Rogers, 1975) and may help to clarify Leventhals (1970) parallel response model. Empirical support for these factors is presented and indicates that beyond some adequate level of utility, personal efficacy is a more important determinant of protective health behavior than response efficacy. The implication for health practitioners is that communications can be very effective in producing acceptance of protective health behavior if a real, but controllable threat is depicted. Therefore, future research should focus upon the ways by which response efficacy and personal efficacy can be enhanced in a health threat communication.