About DTA

The Aetna Life and Casualty Insurance Company originally produced the DTA Program for Driver Improvement. The intention and goals of the program were to improve the performance levels of our nation's drivers and reduce the number of traffic crashes.

Aetna called upon professionals from the fields of education and traffic safety to design the most effective licensed driver program possible. These program architects sought to discover the cause of traffic safety problems rather than simply treat the symptoms, and they concluded that a program designed to accomplish such a goal would require more than just basic driver education facts and figures and rules of the road.

The Aetna research team also determined that the program should apply methods based upon studies which showed that: 1) attitudes control behavior; and 2) individuals who participate in discussions and group activities retain more information. With this in mind, the Aetna team decided that the program they were designing would need to encourage participant response and focus on the attitude of the driver.

Dr. Eric Berne and other noted social scientists gave permission to use their behavioral theories, which were integrated with proven-effective defensive driving techniques. Using the concepts of Transactional Analysis — in particular the behavioral attitude states of Parent, Adult, and Child — drivers could readily identify with the ideas and feelings attributed to each attitude state. Drivers learned how their attitude states caused certain types of driving behavior, and group interaction made for a lively discussion and high audience acceptance of the program. The results of the program proved exceptional.

In 1983, Aetna decided to change directions in corporate social responsibility and sold the rights of their program to Driver Training Associates, Inc. DTA's founder, Glenn Winningham, is retired from Aetna's original Traffic Safety Staff, which developed the Aetna Program for Driver Improvement. Today, Mr. Winningham continues to ensure that the efficacy of the original program and the perpetuation of related copyrighted and research-proven course materials will be maintained well into the next millenium.

The current version of DTA's Program for Driver Improvement is used nationwide by both Fortune 500 companies and public and private sector agencies, and is recognized as one of the few research-proven-effective programs in the driver and traffic safety industry.