Mobile phone use while driving and risk of road traffic injury: applying the Lorenz Curve and associated Gini Index

The objective of this study is to analyze the road traffic injuries according to selected risk factors based upon frequency of mobile phone use by applying the Lorenz curve and the Gini index. This is a prospective casecontrol study which included 217 cases and 217 control drivers. A structured questionnaire was designed to collect demographic information like age, gender, marital status, occupation, residential area, housing conditions, driving experience, type of car, frequency of seatbelt usage, excessive speed and other violations and frequency of mobile phone use. The Lorenz curve and the associated Gini index are applied for characterizing and testing road traffic injuries stratified by mobile phone use. We also showed that the Gini index can itself be interpreted as a probability related to temporal clustering. In conclusion, with the increasing demand for computer technology the proposed method is well-suited for analyzing RTI data.