Experience is Key: Examining the Relative Importance of Factors Influencing Individuals’ Water Conservation

Date

2019

Journal Title

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Volume Title

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Abstract

Conservation of our global natural resources is one of the most pressing concerns facing our international society. One of these crucial resources is water. The current study sought to understand how individual factors such as experience with water scarcity, message framing, and ideology can impact perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors related to water conservation. Through the utilization of an online experiment, the current findings suggest that higher levels of experience with water scarcity predict more concern, more positive credibility perceptions of water conservation messages, and a higher likelihood of conserving water in the future. Message framing, specifically gain frames, predicted more concern and more positive perceptions of message credibility, and ideology only predicted perceptions of message credibility. Implications for global communities, resource managers, and policy decision-makers are discussed.

Description

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Keywords

Water Conservation, Natural Resources, Social Science, Experience, Experiment

Citation

Holland D, Janét K, Landrum A. Experience is Key: Examining the Relative Importance of Factors Influencing Individuals’ Water Conservation. Water. 2019; 11(9):1870. https://doi.org/10.3390/w11091870

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