An investigation into factors influencing participation in water-conservation programs: participation in Victoria's showerhead exchange program
Creators: name: Fitzgerald, David
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 350605
subject: Marketing management (incl. strategy and customer relations)

description: This thesis investigates the factors that influence participation in the ongoing Victorian Showerhead Exchange Program - a water-conservation program that encourages households to exchange their existing showerhead for a new, three-star, water-efficient version.<br><br>A conceptual model has been developed to structure the examination of data that was initially collected as part of a consulting project that focused on investigating diminishing rates of participation in the program. This dissertation draws on access to this data to further investigate the factors that influence program participation by employing advanced statistical methods of analyses and assessing the effects of psychological and behavioural factors that were not examined during the consulting project.<br><br>Specifically, the model presents the opportunity to investigate the psychological constructs of personal norms and environmental concern by utilising the Norm Activation Model (Schwartz, 1977) and by employing the New Ecological Paradigm (Dunlap &amp; van Liere, 1978), respectively. In addition, the behavioural component is tested by investigating the pre-existing, pro-environmental behaviours of respondents. Further, socio-demographic factors that researchers have reported as having influenced pro-environmental behaviours are included within the model to examine their effects on program participation.<br><br>The study employed a causal methodology, supported by quantitative analysis of secondary data obtained from questionnaires administered to 1693 respondents, representing a cross-section of water consumers across Victoria, Australia. In order to determine the influence of the predictor variables represented in the conceptual model, hierarchical binomial logistic regression was employed to discover the most parsimonious model that explains participation in the showerhead exchange program.<br><br>The analysis supports hypotheses that the psychological construct of environmental concern, pre-existing, pro-environmental behaviours and social demographics accounted for the variability of participation in the showerhead exchange program. Further, the study revealed the construct of environmental concern as three-dimensional, rather than uni-dimensional, as the original authors (Dunlap &amp; van Liere, 1978) intended.<br><br>From a managerial perspective, the findings in this study represent an opportunity for communicators and policy makers to develop more precisely targeted, pro-environmental campaign initiatives that are based on deep consideration of context in terms of geography, pro-environmental domain and the specific pro-environmental behaviour being encouraged. From a theoretical standpoint, this study advances the literature in three ways. It investigates whether the additional dimensions to the Norm Activation Model that are represented in the conceptual model improve its predictive capacity; it undertakes an analysis of the New Ecological Paradigm to examine its dimensionality in the context of water conservation in Victoria; and it addresses a gap in the literature as the predictor variables in the conceptual model are applied exclusively to the implementation of a technical, rather than a behavioural, solution for water conservation.<br>In seeking to progress the approach taken by Victorian policy makers to encourage Victorians to conserve water, this study has revealed factors in a parsimonious model that can be employed as a segmentation framework, to advance a more targeted approach to communications. In addition, the research model employed in this study has the potential to be the foundation upon which to investigate a range of other conservation campaigns beyond the context of water and showerhead exchange programs.