Private Well Water Stewardship In Rural Georgia

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-19-2024

Publication Title

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0307281

Abstract

This study sought to identify the psychosocial influences on the practice of well stewardship behaviors (water testing, water treatment, and well maintenance) in rural Georgia, USA. Three interventions (education, the provision of household water treatment systems [HWTS], and both education and HWTS) were evaluated using a four-group, randomized controlled trial. A total of 64 private well owners completed a pretest measuring psychosocial factors and stewardship behaviors before receiving an intervention. Following a 104-day waiting period, participants completed a posttest and interviews were conducted to identify the barriers and facilitators to use (S1 File). Pretest results showed that 34% of well owners have ever tested their water and that only 25% treat their water before consumption. The education-only intervention showed no influence on stewardship behaviors, resulted in no new water tests and had no impact on psychosocial factors. The HWTS-only intervention had no significant effect on testing and treatment behaviors, though it had a significant effect on abilities (R2 = .87, p< 0.05) and self-regulation (R2 = 1.0, p

Comments

Georgia Southern University faculty member, Bettye Apenteng, Andrew Hansen, and Asli Aslan co-authored Private Well Water Stewardship In Rural Georgia.

Copyright

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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