Disgust, Shame and Soapy Water: Tests of Novel Interventions to Promote Safe Water and Hygiene
Raymond P. Guiteras, David I. Levine, Stephen P. Luby, Thomas H. Polley, Kaniz Khatun-e-Jannat, and Leanne Unicomb
Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists vol. 3, no. 2 (June 2016): 321-359. doi: 10.1086/684161. PDF.
Abstract: Lack of access to clean water is among the most pressing environmental problems in developing countries, where diarrheal disease kills nearly 700,000 children per year. While inexpensive and effective practices such as chlorination and hand washing with soap exist, efforts to motivate their use by emphasizing health benefits have seen only limited success. This paper measures the effect of messages appealing to negative emotions (disgust at consumption of human feces) and social pressure (shame at being seen consuming human feces) on hand-washing behavior and use of and willingness to pay for water chlorination among residents of slum compounds in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Neither the traditional, health-based message nor the new disgust-and-shame message led to high levels of chlorination during a free trial, nor to high willingness to pay for the chlorine at the end of the free trial. Provision of low-cost hand-washing facilities did increase hand washing, although the effect size is modest.
Final pre-publication version (open access): CEGA Working Paper 048, August 2015, http://escholarship.org/uc/item/11b9f9s4. PDF: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/11b9f9s4.pdf.
Dataverse site (appendix, supplementary materials, replication code and data): https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/UTGC1L
Sequential randomization companion paper (open access):
Raymond P. Guiteras, David I. Levine, Thomas H. Polley, The pursuit of balance in sequential randomized trials, Development Engineering, Volume 1, June 2016, Pages 12-25, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.deveng.2015.11.001. PDF.
Sequential randomization code: seq_rand_web.7z.