Road crashes in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia : Empirical findings between the years 2010 and 2014

Ethiopia has a high road crash rate in the world. Among the crashes, more than 60% occur in the capital city, Addis Ababa. The main aim of this research was to inform policymakers and researchers about the current situations of road crashes in the city to tackle the current unacceptable costs of the road crashes. We analyzed road crash data between the years 2010 and 2014. The results showed 14,263 persons sustained different levels of injuries in which 1,911 were fatal whereas the rest were serious and minor injuries. Majority of the fatal (79%) and serious (76%) injuries were males, and pedestrians (87%). Most of these crashes were due to the drivers’ not yielding right of way to pedestrians. On the other hand, an estimated 19 million US dollars cost of property damage was due to the drivers not yielding right of way to other vehicles. Generally, among other risk factors we assessed including road conditions and asphalt pavement, drivers’ not yielding right of way to pedestrians and not yielding right of way to other vehicles were the leading risk factors for road crashes in the city.Key Words: Road Crash; Fatalities; Serious Injuries; Minor Injuries; Safet

Breaking ground in cross-cultural research on the fear of being laughed at (gelotophobia): A multi-national study involving 73 countries

The current study examines whether the fear of being laughed at (gelotophobia) can be assessed reliably and validly by means of a self-report instrument in different countries of the world. All items of the GELOPH (Ruch and Titze, GELOPH46, University of Düsseldorf, 1998; Ruch and Proyer, Swiss Journal of Psychology 67:19–27, 2008b) were translated to the local language of the collaborator (42 languages in total). In total, 22,610 participants in 93 samples from 73 countries completed the GELOPH. Across all samples the reliability of the 15-item questionnaire was high (mean alpha of .85) and in all samples the scales appeared to be unidimensional. The endorsement rates for the items ranged from 1.31% through 80.00% to a single item. Variations in the mean scores of the items were more strongly related to the culture in a country and not to the language in which the data were collected. This was also supported by a multidimensional scaling analysis with standardized mean scores of the items from the GELOPH15. This analysis identified two dimensions that further helped explaining the data (i.e., insecure vs. intense avoidant-restrictive and low vs. high suspicious tendencies towards the laughter of others). Furthermore, multiple samples derived from one country tended to be (with a few exceptions) highly similar. The study shows that gelotophobia can be assessed reliably by means of a self-report instrument in cross-cultural research. This study enables further studies of the fear of being laughed at with regard to differences in the prevalence and putative causes of gelotophobia in comparisons to different cultures