The effect of socio-economic characteristics on the use of household water treatment via psychosocial factors: a mediation analysis

Abstract

Household water treatment (HWT) can tackle the issue of consuming unsafe drinking water at home. While household socio-economic characteristics are often assumed to influence the psychology of HWT use, no study has rigorously tested such an assumption. We aim to fill the gap by a cross-sectional study in a rural area in Sumba Timur, Indonesia (N = 256). Using mediation analysis, we demonstrated that psychosocial factors mediated the relationship between socio-economic characteristics and the use of household water treatment, and socio-economic characteristics strongly influenced the psychology of household water treatment usage. The use of HWT asked from different angles allowed more degrees of freedom to better assess the true status of the HWT usage, via the principal component of the answers. This paper concludes that “causal” relationship pathway from socio-economic characteristics to the use of HWT via psychosocial factors is a realistic assumption when assessing the influence of socio-economic characteristics on HWT.