Perceptions of protective actions for a water contamination emergency

Adoption of Protective Behaviours: Residents Response to City Smog in Hefei, China

“…According to Lindell et al. (,b), each protective behaviour was rated on two hazard‐related attributes (protect effectively from city smog and useful for purposes other than city smog), four resource‐related attributes (costs a lot of money, requires specialized knowledge and skills, requires considerable effort and requires significant cooperation from others) and adoption intention (it is something I would like to do). All measurements were taken on a five‐point Likert‐type scale from ‘not at all’ (=1) to ‘a large extent’ (=5).…”

“…We tested the correlation matrices from community and student samples to determine whether the interitem correlations were equal (Huang et al., ,b; Lindell et al., ,b). Box's M test indicated that covariance matrices were equal (Box's M =71.71, F =1.27, p >.05).…”

“…The PADM has already been tested for many risks (Lindell & Perry, 2004). Previous studies have adopted PADM to explain the process by which people perceive risk and take preventive measures to respond to it in relation to events, such as hurricanes, earthquakes and floods (Lindell, Arlikatti & Prater, ; Huang, Li, Liu, Hu, Liu, Chen & Li, ; Huang, Lindell, Prater, Wu & Siebeneck, ; Trainor, Murray‐Tuite, Edara, Fallah‐Fini & Triantis, ; Terpstra & Lindell, ; Lindell, Huang, Wei & Samuelson, ; Lindell, Mumpower, Huang, Wu, Samuelson & Wei, ). Originally proposed to explain how people respond to imminent disasters (Lindell & Perry, ), PADM is based on the assumption that people receive abundant risk information from outside channels.…”

“…Previous studies examined the correlations between risk perception and protective behaviours for many risk situations, such as seismic hazards (23 studies summarized by Lindell et al. ()), floods (Terpstra et al., ; Zaleskiewicz et al., ), hurricanes (Huang et al., ,b; Lindell et al., ,b), volcanic eruptions (Perry & Lindell, ), tornadoes (Trainor et al., ) and water contamination hazards (Lindell et al., ,b). These studies conclude that risk perception has a significant effect on behaviour response.…”

Exposure Path Perceptions and Protective Actions in Biological Water Contamination Emergencies

“…The correlations of risk perception were generally highest for consumption of bottled water and weakest for chlorinated water -probably because respondents believed that bottled water would be much more effective in protecting their health. 54 Overall, these results indicate that local authorities should take care to communicate the relative risks of different exposure paths to ensure that people do not expose themselves to excessive levels of contaminated water from important exposure paths (eg, untreated tap water) or unnecessarily avoid exposure from trivial paths (eg, washing clothes). Authorities need not be unduly concerned about differences in perceptions and responses due to people's demographic characteristics and prior experience.…”