Is Heightened Environmental Sensitivity Responsible for Drop in Young Adults’ Rates of Driver's License Acquisition?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Across a range of developed societies, rates of driver's license acquisition by young adults have fallen from their historic peak levels (which in Britain were in the early 1990s). A widely discussed hypothesis to explain this trend is that the heightened environmental sensitivity of the current cohort of young adults could be fully or in part responsible. The objective of this study was to establish whether empirical evidence provided support for this hypothesis. Public opinion polling data from Britain and the United States and British National Travel Survey microdata were statistically analyzed. No evidence was found, either from the United States or Britain, of the populace becoming increasingly inclined toward environmental protection. On the basis of longitudinal trends in public opinion polling, the opposite seemed to be true. Analysis of British National Travel Survey data (n = 2,820 unlicensed adults aged 17 to 29) showed that few young British adults without driver's licenses (approximately 1%) reported that environmental sensitivity was either the main reason or a contributory reason that they had not acquired a driver's license. By contrast, more than half (59%) of not fully licensed young British adults reported that they were either learning to drive (27%) or were put off mainly by the license acquisition testing requirements (2%) or by costs associated with motoring (30%). These findings are evidence contrary to the hypothesis that growing environmental sensitivity is responsible for falling rates of licensing of young adults, at least in Britain and the United States.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".