Thursday Summary
Orlando Hernandez - Thursday 25 January 2007Issues emanating from the discussion in the past day include the following.
Water treatment vs. water storage
Is the indicator ‘% of households practicing effective household water management’ biased in favor of one of the behaviors associated with POU: water treatment? If so, is this bias to the detriment of another of the POU behaviors: water storage?
Do POU programs pay more attention to water treatment and less attention to water storage? How do programs re-establish the balance and what modifications do we need to make the proposed measurements of behavior to properly account for changes in the adoption of acceptable water storage practices?
Should our indicators separate water treatment from water storage?
Use of different water treatment (and storage?) methods per household
Households do not necessarily use one water treatment method. Research from Bolivia suggests that families use boiling and SODIS. Do the indicators proposed in the background paper for measuring practices allow for multiple water treatment methods to be used within one household on the same day?
If households are using multiple water treatment methods, the amount of water treated using SODIS may seem low. However, this low level may be justifiable as SODIS treated water is only part of the water consumed in a household on a given day.
Focus of the measurements
Focusing how much raw water is consumed in a household might offer a better alternative to focusing on how much treated water is consumed. Projects are attempting to reduce the consumption of raw water to zero. Isn’t % of raw water consumed a better indicator to reflect what programs are intended to do?
Daily consumption of raw water may need to be captured in glasses rather than liters as respondents may not have an idea of how much a liter of water is.
Behavioral Determinants
An expanded theoretical application of behavioral determinants can be found in:
Altherr, A. M., J. J. Mosler, R. Tobias and F. Butera. (2006) Attitudinal and
relational factors predicting the use of solar water disinfection: a field study in
Nicaragua. Health Education and Behavior 20 (5), 1-14.
We urge to give us your insights and opinions into these comments.