Politics around Negligence and Causes:

Traffic Accidents and ‘Jikkyô-Kenbun’

Abstract

This paper aims at describing an aspect of traffic accident problems from a sociological point of view by examining institutional procedures of accident investigations called ‘jikkyô-kenbun’. “Interpretative frames” for evaluating professional negligence resulting in injury or death used by the police greatly influence the process of production of ‘jikkyô-kenbun’. However, those records are presented as objective data, describing the factual elements of the accident. As a result, numerous actors that may have had a decisive role in the accident are made invisible, which allows the social system to attribute the responsibility of the accident only to the persons directly involved.