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An important requisite for an effective use of numerical tools in occupant safety assessment is that suitable models of crash victims are available. Reliable well validated multibody models of several crash dummies have been developed in the last two decades. Flexible parts are modeled as rigid bodies interconnected by joints that account for the flexibility. Recently the finite element method has been used for modeling such parts. In this paper an alternative method is proposed namely as a flexible body with distributed mass and stiffness. To evaluate these methods, three models of a rib module of a EUROSID-1 dummy are compared with the rib modeled as: a chain of nine rigid bodies interconnected by revolute joints, and torsional springs and dampers, one flexible body with the deformation approximated by one predefined displacement mode, a finite element model using triangular shell elements with a linear elastic material behavior and mass proportional Rayleigh damping.