The unintentional injurer: results from the Boston youth survey

Objectives. We sought to provide additional information about the characteristics of adolescents who were most likely to cause unintentional injury to other people.Methods. In 2008, as part of a randomized survey of high-school students in the Boston Public School system, more than 1800 respondents answered questions about unintentionally causing an injury to someone else in the past year.Results. More than 20% of boys and 13% of girls reported unintentionally injuring another person in the past year. Being male, exercising, participating in organized activities, and having carried a knife were risk factors for unintentionally causing an injury during sports. Using illegal drugs, having friends who are a bad influence, and having carried a knife were risk factors for unintentionally causing an injury not associated with sports.Conclusions. Unintentionally injuring another person is a fairly common event for high-school students. Characteristics differ between adolescents who unintentionally injure others during sports versus those who unintentionally injure others during nonsports activities. Many of the risk factors for causing unintentional injury unrelated to sports are similar to those for intentionally causing injury.Many unintentional injuries are self-inflicted (e.g., unintentionally shooting oneself), but many are inflicted by other people (e.g., getting unintentionally shot by someone else).¹ The former might be called intrapersonal unintentional injury and the latter interpersonal unintentional injury—when 1 person unintentionally injures another.The division into self-inflicted and other-inflicted injury is common for intentional injuries; intentional injury deaths are typically divided into suicide (self-inflicted) and homicide (other-inflicted). However, except in regards to motor vehicle injuries, this division is rarely made for unintentional injuries.^1–3 In general, little information is available about people in addition to the injured party who might be involved in an unintentional injury event.For non–motor vehicle unintentional injuries, data on the unintentional injurer are rarely collected. For example, in the World Health Organization “Guidelines for Conducting Community Surveys on Injuries and Violence”⁴ there are questions about the perpetrators of intentional injury, but none about anyone other than the victim when one is collecting data on unintentional injury. As has been the case for interpersonal violence and motor vehicle injuries, we believe that learning more about the injurer in unintentional injury events may provide information about the types of interventions that may prove most effective in preventing injury.We added questions about interpersonal unintentional injury to a survey of high-school students in Boston, Massachusetts, to learn more about this issue. We were interested in understanding the frequency of interpersonal unintentional injuries and the characteristics of the persons who reported unintentionally injuring another. As little has been written about interpersonal unintentional injuries, this analysis was intended to be exploratory rather than firmly based on well-established behavioral models of human behavior.