Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2011, 8 575 poor water conditions also increase the cost of treating water in public systems so that it is safe for consumption. This can lead to changes in water taste despite being safe to drink after treatments. While substituting bottled water for public tap water under these circumstances may be a short term “fix”, it does not address long term problems of water quality or the effect it has on escalating the cost of public water as increased treatments become necessary. Residents of larger communities were found to be more likely to be primary bottled water users, which means that a higher proportion of population in larger communities tend to depend on bottled water rather than their tap water for drinking purpose. Note that this association is established when other conditions are controlled for. That is, for two persons in the same region, with the same perceptions towards their drinking water, surface and ground water quality, and having exactly the same demographic characteristics (age, gender, education), the person from larger community is more likely to depend on bottled water for drinking purpose. As some researchers have suggested, factors like media hype about water supply problems, commercial campaigns on bottled water, or even peer pressure for more fashionable ways of drinking all contribute to bottled water consumption [6,14]. And considering that these factors are usually stronger in larger cities, it is likely that people in larger cities have more negative feelings about their water supply systems and turn to bottled water for solution. However, if respondents were already using some sort of water supply for drinking purpose, then there is no significant association found between their community size and whether or not they regularly consume bottled water. With limited information in our data we were not able to fully explain the associations found between community size and bottled water consumption, and we suggest future research look at community level variables for possible answers. Our data also show that younger people and females are more likely to purchase bottled water. Young people are generally believed to be more susceptible to marketing and advertising, which are essential keys held by the bottled water companies [6,14]. And the higher likelihood of female drinking bottled water is consistent with previous literature on gender differences in risk, especially health and food related risk perceptions [25,26]. The findings about more consumption in these two groups of people suggests a need to target these audiences with messages about the importance of learning about their local water quality as well as the costs and quality differences between bottled water and public drinking water supplies. Our hypothesis about environmental attitudes was not supported by the data. The relationship between environmental attitudes and bottled water use was not significant. Consumers with stronger overall concern about the environment do not seem to transfer this concern to pollution and waste problems associated with purchasing bottled drinking water. But again, because of the relatively longer cycle of research using multistate data (data collection in some states were done back in 2004), our data might not be able to reflect the newest trend of national environmental concern on bottled water. Finally, the hypothesized regional effect regarding bottled water use was confirmed by the data. Residents of the Midwest and west mountain regions were far less likely to use bottled water for either primary drinking purpose or other occasions of regular uses, while residents of the southern pacific, the south, and the southeast were all equally likely to be bottled water users. This suggests that other variables such as culture, actual water quality conditions, media coverage of water issues and other place specific factors may be influencing the decision to use bottled water versus tap water from a