Synthesizing naturalistic driving data : a further review

Abstract

The Naturalistic Driving Study (NDS) methodology has in the past decade proven extremely valuable in providing rich contextual information about the driver, the vehicle and driving environment. Internationally the uptake of the methodology is growing and especially more developed countries are employing NDS on larger and grander scales. As the methodology evolves new data challenges necessitate the development of novel approaches to manage and analyse the data. The NDS methodology has been applied twice within the South African context. Large amounts of quantitative and qualitative data were collected and different application software products are currently used to transcribe and analyse the data. The process is extremely resource intensive and working with the data remains a learning curve. Recommendations were put forward in an earlier study toward the management and integration of these Very Large Databases in order to simplify the analyses of the data. This paper provides feedback in terms of the progress made with the implementation of the recommendations as applied in two new investigations that made use of the previously collected material. The findings though indicate that the battle is far from over and concludes with a review of additional strategies and further recommendations for developing an approach to work with these data and databases.