Rural people's intention to adopt sustainable water management by rainwater harvesting practices: application of TPB and HBM models

Abstract

Water is the prerequisite for human adaptation to climate change and is the key link among climatic conditions, humans, and the environment. Human behavior can mitigate the impacts of climate change. The present study aimed to evaluate rural people's readiness for sustainable management of water resources. To achieve this goal, the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and health belief model (HBM) were used as the research framework. The research instrument was a closed-end questionnaire developed on the basis of TPB and HBM. The face and content validity of the questionnaire was confirmed by a panel of experts in sustainable agriculture. Its reliability was also checked in a pilot study by calculating Cronbach's alpha, the AVE, R2, and CR. The research sample was composed of 480 villagers from Hamadan province, Iran, who were familiar with sustainable water resources management in the context of the rooftop rainwater harvesting project. The results showed that in TPB, the variables of moral norms, attitude, and self-identity could account for 61 percent of the variance in rural people's intention to adopt the practices of sustainable water resources management. Based on HBM, the variables of perceived benefits, perceived susceptibility, and perceived severity could capture 49 percent of this variance. The results revealed that both theories had the potential to predict rural people's intention to engage in the sustainable management of water resources, but TPB proved to provide a more robust prediction than HBM.

Farmers’ Contributions to Achieving Water Sustainability: A Meta-Analytic Path Analysis of Predicting Water Conservation Behavior

“…In fact, sustainability cannot be achieved in agricultural water resource management by considering only biophysical and ecological conditions, allegedly hard systems; the stance of hard systems definitely depends on human features and reciprocal linkages, known as soft systems [4]. From this point of view, providing non-monetary strategies and operational measures to change the BI and accept voluntary behavior of farmers along with price and monetary strategies [6,10,11] are core issues in achieving the strategic management of agricultural water resources.…”

“…There is a very rich body of evidence on water saving and conservation behaviors with actors such as households and citizens in the urban sector [17][18][19] and the agricultural sector [5,6,10,11,20]. The synthesis of existing evidence on BI and WCB, derived from analyzing the causal associations of the constructs of social-psychological theories, is a method by which it is possible to integrate contradictious research evidence.…”

The Construction of Intelligent Emotional Analysis and Marketing Model of B&B Tourism Consumption Under the Perspective of Behavioral Psychology

“…Correlation analysis was conducted separately for the components of spatial vitality of B&B and the vitality index. Correlation analysis refers to the analysis of the closeness of correlation between two different variables and contains the correlation coefficient and the degree of correlation ( Aliabadi et al, 2020 ). Through modeling and analysis of tourists’ behavioral psychology, big data captures tourists’ emotional preferences for homestays, to recommend targeted homestays that meet their preferences, and achieve the purpose of promoting tourists’ travel consumption and secondary consumption, and even word-of-mouth communication.…”

Analysis of farmers’ environmental sustainability behavior: the use of norm activation theory (a sample from Iran)

“…The questionnaire consisted of two sections: the first section was related to the demographic characteristics and the second to the constructs of NAT. The environmental sustainability behavior of farmers was defined as farmers’ activities for water management, pest management, and soil management in their farms (Aliabadi et al 2020 ). Therefore, farmers’ environmental sustainability behavior was investigated based on three dimensions: water management, pest management, and soil management.…”