Educational and Advocacy Tools

The Center for Injury Research and Prevention's education specialists create evidence-based educational tools for use by public-health educators, clinicians and parents. Materials are available for the following areas of research:

Child Passenger Safety & Traffic Injury

The Car Seat Safety for Kids website offers a complete library of educational materials for child passenger safety practitioners, parents, and advocates. Resources include how-to installation videos, state-by-state fact sheets, illustrations, charts and reports.

  • A Guide to the American Academy of Pediatrics' (AAP) Recommendations

    The AAP has revised its recommendations for keeping children safe in vehicles. Here we provide multimedia materials explaining the research behind these changes and what parents need to know to keep their children safe as motor vehicle passengers.

  • Interactive Website

    The Center for Injury Research and Prevention at CHOP hosts a website (Car Seat Safety for Kids) to help children stay safe in cars.

  • Videos

    The Center for Injury Research and Prevention at CHOP offers a series of short interactive videos for parents and educators looking for comprehensive, easy-to-understand information on correctly restraining children in motor vehicles. These videos can be found online at www.chop.edu/carseat. These videos will be available in Spanish later in 2012. For additional videos on child passenger safety, please visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

  • Child Passenger Safety Reports

    Download reports on the state of child passenger safety research, intervention and policy for educational purposes.

  • Charts and Images

    Child passenger safety data provide a scientific foundation for legislative action and have been utilized in state and federal initiatives focused on strengthening child occupant restraint laws. The charts and images featuring relevant data can be downloaded and enlarged for use in advocating for stronger laws and appropriate restraint use.

  • Educational Illustrations

    The Center has created a series of 37 educational illustrations, with descriptions in English and Spanish, to help demonstrate proper restraint use for a variety of ages, sizes, vehicle types, and restraint types. Use these illustrations to enhance presentations, fact sheets, and brochures with accurate depictions of vehicle safety features, restraint types, and correct vs. incorrect restraint use. Convenient indexes also are available for reference.

  • Educational Fact Sheets

    Download these single-page, black-and-white, photocopier-friendly educational tools designed in collaboration with the American Academy of Pediatrics for distribution and use in pediatric practices. They address the many questions parents and caregivers may have about safe seating positions for children, use of belts and tethers, safe cars for families, correct belt-positioning booster seat use, transitioning children to adult seat belts, and helping teens to be smart passengers.

  • Fotonovela

    This Spanish-language fotonovela was developed as an educational tool to promote booster seats among Latino communities.

Young Driver Safety

Through a unique multidisciplinary academic-industry research alliance called The Young Driver Research Initiative (YDRI), The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and State Farm Insurance Companies® are working to advance science to reduce teen driver-related crashes, the No. 1 cause of death for adolescents. This science fuels the YDRI effort to develop and disseminate evidence-based interventions, education, and policy to promote safe driving-related behaviors among teens and their parents.
Available resources from this alliance include:

Post-injury Care and Recovery

The Child and Adolescent Reactions to Injury and Trauma (CARIT) team has developed evidence-based materials (brochures and tip sheets) for parents and healthcare providers. Throughout the development of these materials and website, we solicited formal and informal feedback from parents and pediatric health care providers regarding the clarity, usefulness, and acceptability of the messages and the design.

  • Interactive Website

    • The Center for Injury Research and Prevention at CHOP created this site so parents can understand their children's emotional reactions to injury and learn more about what they can do to help their children respond in a healthy way – www.aftertheinjury.org.

  • Legislative Update

    • Read the full testimony of CIRP Founder and Scientific Director Flaura Winston, MD, PhD, given in a Congressional hearing on traumatic brain injury in children.

    A Brief Report: Current Best Practices and Practical Tools for Health-Care Providers

    This report describes the current state of the art in screening for risk of psychological sequelae of injury, and presents guidelines regarding promising targets and methods for preventive interventions across the emergency medical services continuum.

Educational and Advocacy Tools

Read the second in an annual report series on teen driving, which highlights the progress made in reducing crashes involving teens behind the wheel between 2005 and 2010: Download Miles to go: Monitoring Progress in Teen Driver Safety.

CPS Issue Report

Learn what CIRP Founder and Scientific Director Flaura Winston, MD, PhD, told Congressional legislators about pediatric brain injury during a hearing in Washington, DC in March 2012. Visit the Legislative Update page.