Seat belt research: Are we being misled?

Here's the lead of an Associated Press story by Ken Thomas about a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report on seat belt use:

Seat belt use is reaching record levels, so just who are the holdouts who fail to buckle up? Often they are young men who live in rural areas and drive pickups, the government says.

A press release about the report (both the release and report can be downloaded from the NHTSA home page), puts what Thomas says this way:

The report found the last of the unbuckled to be largely young and male, likely to live in rural areas and/or drive pickup trucks.

But Report authors Cherian Varghese and Umesh Shankar say:

When examined more closely, the data shows that the proportion of unrestrained fatalities was higher among males, on rural roadways, in pickup trucks and SUV’s, in single-vehicle crashes, and in the age group of 8 to 44 years old.

The authors' lumping of pickups and SUVs gave me pause. As it happens, they found that 18 percent of the dead (in 2004) traveled in pickups, and 15 percent were in SUVs. Sixty percent were in cars, and the rest were in vans or "other light trucks."

The report doesn't say anything about the relative prevalence of these classes of vehicles in rural and urban areas, so there's no way to know if driving a pickup in a rural area is more or less dangerous than driving a car in the same place.

Another false note struck in the press release and AP story is the age bit. Young men are indeed at higher risk, but I don't think that "young men" typically means ages 8-44, and all of those ages show a non-use rate of above 62 percent. The 21-24 set scores highest in non-use of seat belts when killed (at 66 percent), but the 8- to 15-year-olds and 35- to 44-year-olds (62 percent) aren't far behind.

My nitpicking aside, the press release and story appear to be largely on the mark, but I want to know more about who drives what in all the other cases (i.e. the times people drive that don't result in a fatal accident).

This kind of research strikes me as valuable but incomplete, kind of like the NHTSA's plan to spend $31 million on advertising to target these young, male, rural, pickup-driving scofflaws.

Who, just maybe, might not be moved by an ad showing "vehicles including pickup trucks driven in several regions of the country, with unbelted vehicle occupants receiving tickets, and then buckling up."