2012 Volume 21 Issue 1-2 Pages 103-114
Arsenic contamination of drinking water in rural areas of India and Bangladesh has been a serious problem. Although activities for improvement are continuously practiced by local NGO and foreign agencies, the problem is still in a serious situation. In this study, focusing on residents' voluntary attitude for improving their environments, in particular which is related to water in the case areas, it is analyzed how the voluntary attitude is formed through the enlighten activities. In the pragmatic arena, it is already common knowledge that the enlighten activities work under certain circumstances but it does not necessarily do. In this study, the mechanism of the voluntary attitude change is modeled in a mathematical way. The results of questionnaire survey in rural villages of India and Bangladesh are applied to the model. The questionnaire is conducted once in Bangladeshi case village and twice in Indian case village. The questionnaires in Indian village were conducted before and after information dissemination regarding arsenic. In Bangladesh, lots of donors and NGOs have been giving the information to villagers. On the other hand, local people in India do not know the risk of arsenic well because information about arsenic has been hardly offered. By conducting latent mixture model analysis between Bangladeshi village and Indian village, it is analyzed how different the mechanism of the voluntary attitude is. Secondly, to testify the analysis result, the same model is applied to pre- and post-questionnaire results of Indian village. Finally, based on the findings through the model analysis, the measures to conduct enlighten activities more efficiently and conveniently are proposed.
