Development of a new measure to check attitude towards water conservation

MethodsX. 2023 Jan 20:10:101992. doi: 10.1016/j.mex.2022.101992. eCollection 2023.

Abstract

Water Conservation is the need of the hour and attitudes towards conserving the resources is what is sure to become a priority in the coming years. In order to understand what could influence the change in attitude and thereby bring about a change of behavior, we first need to shift our attention from understanding the water crisis to understanding the existing attitude of the society towards a water crisis. In the current work we address the current attitude towards water conservation by providing baseline data about Indians' attitudes and behavior/behavioral intentions in conserving water. We introduce a scale constructed to test the Attitude towards water conservation in India. The scale consists of 20 items divided into 5 sub-scales. We conducted a nationwide survey on 430 Participants and their responses were checked for reliability. The internal consistency values of all 5 scales were ranged between 0.68 and 0.73 •Out of the 15 questions from Attitude towards water conservation from Dolnicar, S., & Hurlimann, A. (2010) 1 question was changed to suit Indian context•5 questions were added to show Perceived Moral Obligation, Behavioral Intensions and Perceived Water Rights.

Keywords: Attitude scale; Attitudes; Development of a new measure to check attitude towards water conservation; Moral obligation to save water; Perceived water right; Water conservation.