Changing Homeowners’ Behaviors Involving Toxic Household Chemicals: A Psychological, Multilevel Approach

Abstract

We describe an education and behavior change program with a multi-level approach. The program goal is to change how people think about, use, store, and dispose of toxic household chemicals. We assume that changing long-standing behaviors is difficult, requires interventions at multiple points in the individual/ group/society/physical environmental system, and requires interventions that address both short-and long-term behavior change. The heart of our program is small group discussions, with a trained leader who uses psychological theories to increase educational impact. Questionnaires indicated that participants were very pleased with the program, especially recipes for homemade nontoxic alternatives. ].We estimate that the presentation yielded almost three times as much cooperation as the previous 5 years of publicity and promotion (33% vs. 12%).For several years, our research team has been developing an education and behavior change program based on a multilevel or holistic approach. We assume that getting people to change a long-standing behavior is very difficult, requires interventions at multiple points in the individual/group/society/physical environmental system and requires interventions that address both short-and long-term behavior change. The program is based on Werner's (1999) five-factor model of behavior change and a transactional worldview (Werner, 2000; Werner, Brown, & Altman, in press). In our particular program, we have been working with the county health department to teach people about a new facility for disposing of household hazardous waste (HHW). This article briefly describes our current program and plans for improving it. It also describes some of the mistakes we made early on and how we changed the program in response to negative reactions from our target audiences. We begin with a very brief description of the program, provide some evidence of its impact, explain the underlying psychological principles on which the program has been based while illustrating the principles with details from our program, discuss our early failures, and speculate about where to take the program next. Our experiences illuminate the difficulty of working in the community to effect behavior change but also illustrate how we wove together multiple behavior change strategies into a total program. Background on Household Hazardous WasteHHW is any kind of home use chemical leftover that is harmful to the environment and animals (including humans) even in small amounts. HHW includes products that harm or injure on contact or that are harmful because they pollute groundwater, surface waters, air, or soil. Common leftovers include paints, pesticides, petroleum products, moth crystals, and lye-based oven and drain cleaners. It is important to keep these products out of landfills because of their potential to leach out and contaminate soil, water, and air. Most large communities now have periodic HHW collection days or a permanent HHW facility where citizens can take their leftover toxic products instead of puttin...

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