Instrumentation is one of the threats to the validity of experiments. Four possible cases of instrumentation in a time series of traffic accident statistics in Illinois since the mid-1970s were tested, primarily by using autoregressive integrated moving average methods. Two of these cases, a 1977 change in the reporting threshold for property-damage-only (PDO) accidents and a 1989 change in the definition of a fatality, were not found to be significant. A 1989 change in the method of tabulating monthly data and a 1992 change in the reporting threshold for PDO accidents were statistically significant. These two cases combined could account for a more than 15 percent decline in PDO accidents.
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