Who conserves and who approves? Predicting water conservation intentions in urban landscapes with referent groups beyond the traditional ‘important others’

Abstract

Water availability and conservation are among today’s top global issues, and urban irrigated landscapes have a pronounced role to play in developing solutions to water scarcity problems. Innovative approaches are needed to promote water conservation outside of the home, and social norms comprise one such type of strategy that can accelerate the use of landscape water conservation technologies and practices. However, social expectations (injunctive norms) and others’ engagement in a behavior (descriptive norms) are often not fully considered, and these normative influences are often not measured beyond the traditional ‘important others’. A national survey was used to gather quantitative data from 2601 individuals across the United States. Framed by the Reasoned Action Approach, data were collected on participants’ attitudes, perceived behavioral control, and injunctive and descriptive norms relative to the traditional important others along with neighbors, other state residents, and other national residents. In the absence of the additional three groups, both descriptive and injunctive norms predicted water conservation intentions in a multiple regression model. When the additional referents were added, neighborhood and state descriptive norms and neighborhood injunctive norms overpowered injunctive norms drawn from important others. The perceived actions of important others (descriptive norms) remained the most powerful predictor. Normative beliefs specific to certain referent groups explain additional variation in behavioral intent beyond that of norms associated with important others. The findings revealed neighbors’ approval of conservation practices may be even more important than approval from those people an individual defines as important. Altogether, an understanding of perceptions of whether important others, neighbors, and people across the state conserve (descriptive norms) as well as what their neighbors approve of (injunctive norms) explains United States residents’ intent to engage in water conservation.