Beliefs About Utility, Private Well, and Bottled Water Quality & Management of New Jersey Residents. B. B. Johnson, New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, Trenton, NJ; and D. Kovacs, and C. Chess, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
Understanding of consumers’ beliefs about drinking water is an important component of good communication about and management of drinking water quality. Important beliefs to understand include those about water quality, how it might become contaminated, how such contamination might be prevented or cleaned up, and who is responsible for drinking water quality and how. Although an increasing majority of Americans are served by water utilities, many are still served by private residential wells, and a large number have shifted in part or wholly to bottled water for ordinary drinking purposes (in part out of concern for the safety of utility-provided water). The study reported here thus undertook to question citizens in New Jersey about all three sources of water. Four categories of informants—each category including fifteen homeowners—took part in non-directive interviews: utility customers whose utilities did or did not have recent water contamination experience, and private well water consumers in communities with and without recent water contamination experience. Interviewing informants in these four categories aimed to test the hypothesis that people with contamination experience would have different beliefs about drinking water. All interviewees were asked about bottled water at the end of the interview. A particular focus of this research was on beliefs about the management of drinking water quality—by whom, how, and how well—in addition to the standard focus of "mental models" research on understanding of causal links in contamination. This paper will present study results, and discuss their implications for drinking water communication and management as well as for the conduct of "mental models" research.
This study was supported by New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection contract SR97-079.
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