The reauthorized Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) of 1996 added provisions requiring all
community water systems (CWS) to deliver annual water quality reports called Consumer
Confidence Reports (CCRs) to their customers. With an estimated 46,000 CWS required to
develop and distribute CCRs to their customers each year, the CCR requirement poses an
important challenge for water utilities to disseminate information to their customers. The
research reported here was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of CCRs and to better
understand the effect of CCRs on water utility customers, specifically to evaluate whether
and how CCRs influence consumer perceptions, and what attributes of CCRs most influence
consumers' perceptions.
Developing effective communications is a deliberate process that can build on past experience
and the experience of other water utilities and researchers. Toward that end, the authors sought
input from a wide range of relevant sources that included previous research, water utility
managers and staff, and the actual customers for whom the communications are intended. The
authors' goals included:
reviewing what is currently known about public perceptions of drinking water safety,
the effect of water utility communications on those perceptions, and the research
methods used to make those assessments;
determining what water utilities are currently doing to meet the CCR requirements,
and what information the CWS would find most helpful;
reviewing and analyzing the content and attributes of the CCRs that water utilities are
currently sending to their customers;
linking those attributes with customer reactions in an experimental setting to
determine what makes a CCR more "usable" for a customer and more "effective" for
a water utility;
assessing the current reach of CCRs and other water utility communications, and the
impact these communications are having on customer awareness, perceptions, and
attitudes about drinking water safety and their local water utility; and,
integrating all of this information into a set of observations, conclusions, and
recommendations that local water utilities can apply to evaluate and improve their
own communications, including both the mandatory CCR and other voluntary
methods.
To achieve these goals, the authors used several different techniques to conduct primary research
with the aim of better understanding CCR effectiveness. The research comprised five integrated
tasks:
Task 1 - a mail survey of 118 water utilities exploring what CWS are doing to meet
the CCR requirements;
Task 2 - ten directed micro-focus groups with water utility customers in five cities to
explore customer reactions to reading CCRs;
Task 3 - CCR attribute characterization, where 127 CCRs were coded on 95 attributes
to explore what attributes are most important in determining the usability of
CCRs;
Task 4 - a national random sample of the general population, conducted via a
telephone survey with 1,146 water utility customers and 268 well water users,
to investigate the current reach and impact of CCRs; and,
Task 5 - a central site survey with 152 water utility customers in three cities, which
evaluated CCRs on multiple response scales to determine how customers react
to CCR attributes.
Includes 11 references, tables.
| Edition : | Vol. - No. |
| File Size : | 1
file
, 330 KB |
| Note : | This product is unavailable in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus |
| Number of Pages : | 20 |
| Published : | 04/07/2004 |
