Testing the Waters: A Sociological Analysis of Domestic Water Use and Consumption

Abstract

By looking at water as a sociological object of analysis, the chapter outlines how the insights obtained from sociology can help to a great extent when framing both water as a commodity and water use as a practice. Building on the existing literature, the chapter discusses the specificity of Italy as a meaningful case study and focuses on water saving behaviour and bottled water consumption as two facets of water sustainability. After a preliminary account on the sociology of water and on the characteristics of the Italian context, we make use of the 2014 Multipurpose Survey of Daily Life and the 2014 Survey on Household Consumption by ISTAT to analyse whether water saving behaviour and bottled water consumption are stratified by economic and cultural resources. We provide evidence that while water saving behaviour is almost evenly distributed across the population, the probability of purchasing bottled water is highly dependent on the economic resources of the household. In the conclusion, we discuss our findings and their major limitations, and provide some additional research questions that sociologists could help address.