The effect of a brief educational programme for improving attitudes about purified recycled water

With a growing need for efficient use of water in a large metropolitan community, a municipal water district has developed an experiential educational programme to help customers develop acceptance of purified recycled water (PRW). This programme involves touring a small‐scale working purification facility that does not provide consumer drinking water but serves as a demonstration centre. Two empirical studies demonstrated the positive impact of this educational program. In Study 1, a pre‐/post‐research design was used to examine scores on a measure of attitudes about PRW for 70 undergraduate students who were asked to tour the demonstration centre. These participants expressed more favourable attitudes after the tour than they expressed before the tour (t = 8.76, df = 68, p < 0.001, d = 1.06), suggesting that the demonstration centre positively impacted attitudes about PRW. In Study 2, an experimental design allowed for a comparison of attitudes about PRW for undergraduate students who were given an informational tour of the demonstration centre (n = 27), compared to students who did not tour the demonstration centre until after their data were collected (n = 30). Participants who toured the demonstration centre expressed more positive attitudes on a self‐report measure of PRW attitudes than those who had not completed the tour (t = 2.24, df = 50.0, p = 0.03, d = 0.60); however, the two groups did not differ in the amount of water they sampled (t = 0.29, df = 55.65, p = 0.77, d = 0.08) or in facial expressions associated with happiness (t = 1.34, df = 53.89, p = 0.19, d = 0.38) or disgust (t = 0.86, df = 53.14, p = 0.40, d = 0.39) when drinking a sample of water. Together, these studies demonstrate the effectiveness of an experiential demonstration centre in increasing positive attitudes towards purified recycled water.