Browsing by Author "Grupper, Madeline A."

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    Exploring the Role of Trust in Drinking Water Systems in Western Virginia
    Grupper, Madeline A. (Virginia Tech, 2020-08-27)
    As the impacts of global change drivers and anthropogenic influences increase, the lakes and reservoirs that communities rely on for their drinking water are threatened by more frequent, severe, and unpredictable disturbances. This study was a part of an interdisciplinary effort to understand and increase resilience in water systems to improve managers adaptive capacity to cope with these disturbances. A key element of social resilience is trust, which can improve the speed and effectiveness of management actions and can spillover into community wellbeing and behavioral outcomes, including acceptance or rejection of tap water. Using a four-stage drop off pick up method, I surveyed 611 residents in Roanoke, Virginia to examine the role of trust in drinking water systems between a community and their utility. I first focused on factors that related to a person's trust in their water utility. I examined the relationship between four determinants of trust ecology, the salience of a trusting behavior, and trust, as well as and the effects of information provision about new water security technologies on trust. I then assessed trust's role in characterizing drinking water behavior (i.e. water source usage) alongside factors of risk, water quality evaluations, and salience. I found that trust can be high in low salience situations and information provision had no effect on trust, suggesting that people might take their water security for granted when it is not at the forefront of their thoughts. Calculated beliefs about a utility's capability were only linked to increasing trust when those beliefs were negative, suggesting that people might have a threshold where their utility is capable enough to trust. Even in the absence of the information to form affinitive judgments, value and goodwill-based judgments were important to community trust. Lastly, understanding behaviors might provide indicators for managers about the state of community perceptions of their water since trust, risk perceptions, and evaluations of tap water's taste, smell, and appearance varied based on an individual's water source choice. These findings demonstrate the complexity and importance of community's trust in their water managers. This study of, and continued research into, trust can help us further our understanding of, and the tools to build, the resilient water systems needed to preserve water security and community health.
  • Thumbnail Image
    How Perceptions of Trust, Risk, Tap Water Quality, and Salience Characterize Drinking Water Choices
    Grupper, Madeline A.; Schreiber, Madeline E.; Sorice, Michael G. (MDPI, 2021-03-18)
    Provision of safe drinking water by water utilities is challenged by disturbances to water quality that have become increasingly frequent due to global changes and anthropogenic impacts. Many water utilities are turning to adaptable and flexible strategies to allow for resilient management of drinking water supplies. The success of resilience-based management depends on, and is enabled by, positive relationships with the public. To understand how relationships between managers and communities spill over to in-home drinking water behavior, we examined the role of trust, risk perceptions, salience of drinking water, and water quality evaluations in the choice of in-home drinking water sources for a population in Roanoke Virginia. Using survey data, our study characterized patterns of in-home drinking water behavior and explored related perceptions to determine if residents’ perceptions of their water and the municipal water utility could be intuited from this behavior. We characterized drinking water behavior using a hierarchical cluster analysis and highlighted the importance of studying a range of drinking water patterns. Through analyses of variance, we found that people who drink more tap water have higher trust in their water managers, evaluate water quality more favorably, have lower risk perceptions, and pay less attention to changes in their tap water. Utility managers may gauge information about aspects of their relationships with communities by examining drinking water behavior, which can be used to inform their future interactions with the public, with the goal of increasing resilience and adaptability to external water supply threats.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Understanding residents’ perspectives about drinking water in the Roanoke Valley
    Grupper, Madeline A.; Sorice, Michael G. (2020-09)
    This document provides descriptive data for a survey conducted September through November of 2019 on a random sample of residents in the Roanoke Valley of Virginia who receive in-home water from a municipal source. Details about sampling and data collection are available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10919/99860