Abstract
Endogeneity or reverse causality in regression analysis results in biased estimation of the effects of independent variables on the dependent variable and leads to inaccurate interpretations. However, the biased estimation of the effects of psychological factors on water–related behaviours are rarely discussed. This study investigated the endogeneity of psychological factors in water-related behaviour using an instrument variable (IV) approach. Data from eight household water treatment (HWT) studies in Asia, Africa, and South America were utilized. A combination of several socio-economic characteristics, such as education and accessibility, was used as a control variable and three psychological factors, i.e., perception of risk, attitude towards HWT, and social norms, were used as the predictors of the adoption of HWT. Variables related to institutional quality of the countries, based on the World Governance Indicators of the World Bank were used as IVs to predict the psychological factors. The results suggest that endogeneity exists in water-related behavioural studies. Institutions were found to be valid IV for psychological factors attitude and norms, but not for the perception of risk. This suggests that the institutional quality influences households’ attitude and norms regarding behaviour. If the feedback effect of actual behaviour on the psychological factors were not considered, the effects of attitude and norms on HWT adoption were underestimated by 59% and 40%, respectively. Finally, despite the challenge of finding valid IV, the endogeneity effect of psychological factors needs to be controlled when estimating the effect of psychological factors on water-related behaviour in future water-related behavioural studies.
Highlights
Accelerating the provision of water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) services are critical to achieving 100 % safely managed WASH services by 2030
We argue that culture is the main conduit of the influence of institutions (IVs) on household water treatment (HWT) adoption behaviour and that any remaining correlation between instrument variable (IV) and the HWT adoption is due to “culture” variable used in the analysis not being exhaustive
The results show that a single Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) indicator was weakly correlated with risk and attitude, but reasonably correlated with norms, giving an average R2 of 0.179 (Table 3)
Summary
Accelerating the provision of water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) services are critical to achieving 100 % safely managed WASH services by 2030. In 2017, there were still about 2.2 and 4.2 billion people without safely managed drinking water and sanitation services world wide, respectively (UNICEF, & WHO, 2019). One of the challenges of achieving this goal is the water-related behaviour of a target group (Ginja, Gallagher, & Keenan, 2019). Human behaviour, including WASH-related behaviour, is directly influenced by an individual’s psychology and perceptions (Aunger & Curtis, 2016). Understanding the drivers of behaviour is the first step in developing effective behav ioural change interventions. Afterwards, a WASH implementer can target critical behavioural drivers to accelerate the behavioural change. It is believed that theory-based interventions will result in more effective behavioural change interventions (Davis, Campbell, Hildon, Hobbs, & Michie, 2015), as there are several success stories of using theory-based interventions in the WASH sector (Lilje & Mosler, 2018; Sonego, Huber, & Mosler, 2013; Tidwell et al, 2019)
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