Behavioural Change
Introduction
Whenever people should adopt a mitigation option for geogenic contaminants, they are required to change their normal conduct of life, they need to change aspects of their everyday behavior, e.g. filtering their drinking water or fetching water from a community filter. As behaviour is the result of the processing of beliefs, emotions, knowledge and expectancies, these psychological factors have to be altered when behaviour should be changed.
This module of the WRQ project is dedicated to first identifying
relevant psychological factors for the adoption and the habitual use of
mitigation options and second to develop successful strategies for changing
these factors. This is generally done by a first pilot survey where a
representative sample of the target population is interviewed and the
differences between users and non users of an option are compared. The results
of this survey are then used to select behavioural change techniques according
to the psychological factors that have to be changed.
The goals of this module are to:
- Identify relevant psychological factors for the habitual use of mitigation options for geogenic contaminants.
- Develop and test different dissemination and behaviour change techniques to prompt a large number of persons of a threatened population to use mitigation options habitually.
Click here for an introduction to the methods employed to study and encourage behavioural change