help me respond to this article!

[bethng]

Forgive me if this has already been discussed. Anyway...I need some links, studies, videos etc....to forward to my friend who is very lax in car seat safety and sent me this article to prove her point.


http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/SeatBeltSolution.pdf

[Melizerd]

well I'd argue that it says "properly used seat belts" How many 2 or 3 year olds properly use a seat belt?

brb DS...

[sanctareparata]

First of all, they examined FATAL crash statistics. So the rates of death among car-seat restrained and seat-belt restrained children were similar. There is no mention in the article of the speeds of these collisions, or what happened in the collisions (were they roll-overs, head-on collisions or side impacts?)

What I'm implying is that if the accident is bad enough, a car seat will not necessarily save a child's life, whereas even a mild accident can take the life of a child in a seatbelt. In other words, if they examined 100 25 mph crashes in which children were in seatbelts, and those children died, that is a BIG difference from examining 100 75 mph crashes that were also rollovers in which the children were in carseats and died. You know?

Furthermore, the stats clearly tell us that EIGHT out of TEN carseats are installed incorrectly. Is this taken into account in the FARS statistics? No. How do they know that these carseats were correctly installed? They don't. If every one had been installed 100% perfectly, then I'll bet those statistics would have been different.

And lastly, the article mentions that when they performed the crash tests themselves, they didn't have monitoring devices on the necks of the dummies - only chests and heads. Hello? A neck is a pretty DARN important part of a child's anatomy. So just because the dummies' heads come out okay, that doesn't mean their necks did.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A07E4D8163CF937A15754C0A9639C8B 63

[Jeanum]

If you do a search on this board for "Freakonomics," a book with a carseat chapter authored by the economists in the OP's link, you'll find oodles of stuff to refute their article. For instance, here's a CHOP study that refutes it pretty well: http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/micro_stories.pl?ACCT=159681&TICK=CHOP&STORY=/www/story/06-05-2006/0004374684&EDATE=Jun+5,+2006 :thumbsup: