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Related Experiment Videos

Do reports on drinking water quality affect customers' concerns? Experiments in report content.

Branden B Johnson1

  • 1Bureau of Risk Analysis, Division of Science, Research and Technology, New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, Trenton 08625-0409, USA. Branden.Johnson@dep.state.nj.us

Risk Analysis : an Official Publication of the Society for Risk Analysis
|September 13, 2003
PubMed
Summary

Annual drinking water quality reports have minimal impact on public perception, as generic risk beliefs, not report content, drive consumer concern. Consumers struggle to interpret report data, limiting effectiveness.

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Area of Science:

  • Environmental Science
  • Public Health
  • Risk Communication

Background:

  • The Safe Drinking Water Act Amendments of 1996 mandated annual drinking water quality reports from U.S. utilities.
  • These reports aimed to inform customers about water quality and encourage improvements.
  • The effectiveness of these reports in influencing public perception and behavior was largely untested.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To experimentally assess consumer reactions to different formats of annual drinking water quality reports.
  • To determine if report content, including health standard violations, influences customer understanding and concern.
  • To evaluate the impact of report design on judgments of water quality and utility performance.

Main Methods:

  • A controlled experiment with a random sample of New Jersey water customers.

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  • Participants were exposed to various water quality report formats (Qualitative, Basic, Extended) with and without health standard violations.
  • Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was used to compare responses across different report versions and a control group.

    • Main Results:

    • Report format and the presence of health standard violations had limited impact on overall judgments of water quality or utility performance.
    • Consumers struggled to accurately identify substance amounts or violations within the reports.
    • Generic risk beliefs, such as perceived local environmental problems and lack of control, were stronger predictors of concern than report content.

    Conclusions:

    • Annual drinking water quality reports, as mandated, are unlikely to significantly alter public perception or concern.
    • Report design improvements had minimal effect, and consumers often failed to process key information.
    • Public concern about drinking water quality is primarily driven by pre-existing risk beliefs rather than specific report details.