A quarter of a century of the DBQ: some supplementary notes on its validity with regard to accidents

We show by means of computer simulation that correlations with accidents are necessarily small because accidents are rare events. An updated meta-analysis on the zero-order correlations between the DBQ and self-reported accidents yielded an overall r of .13 (fixed-effect and random-effects models) for violations (57,480 participants; 67 samples) and .09 (fixed-effect and random-effects models) for errors (66,028 participants; 56 samples).

An analysis of a previously published DBQ dataset (975 participants) showed that by aggregating across four measurement occasions, the correlation coefficient with self-reported accidents increased from .14 to .24 for violations and from .11 to .19 for errors. Our meta-analysis also showed that DBQ violations ( r = .24; 6353 participants; 20 samples) but not DBQ errors ( r = − .08; 1086 participants; 16 samples) correlated with recorded vehicle speed.