CoPe Wastewater treatment, attitudes, community resilience large scale survey responses pooled (US & NC sample)

To better understand how attitudes impact decision making related to community resilience from natural hazards, we developed a questionnaire with two cooperative game theory measures, the SVO and in four archetypical mixed mode game descriptions (Maximum Difference (MD), Assurance (A), Chicken (C) and Prisoners’ Dilemma (PD)) and a Contingent Valuation study, to obtain willingness to pay for two alternative on-site wastewater treatment system technologies: advanced septic systems and cluster septic systems.<br><br>The survey was reviewed and approved by the East Carolina University Institutional Review Board (IRB) on 11/25/2024 (UMCIRB 24-001830). After answering a few preliminary questions, respondents were presented with an introductory paragraph defining some key concepts related to on-site wastewater treatment systems (OWTS) (wastewater, determining which wastewater treatment system technology the respondent currently uses, on-site vs. centralized wastewater treatment). After explaining how to know which technology the respondent uses in their home, we asked respondents to identify and name their current treatment system. If the respondent mentioned they did not currently use septic or advanced septic, they were prompted to indicate if they ever lived in a home that did use a septic system. These two questions were used to filter participants into the two different groups: 1. people without prior OWTS experience, who were shown the New House scenario only, and 2. people who indicated that they either currently reside in a home that uses OWTS and people who said they had previously lived in such a residence, who were randomly assigned to either the New House or the New System scenario. <br>The survey furthermore contains information about social value orientation (SVO), which can determine whether people are pro-self or pro-social when in interdependent situations. Participants are completing questions on their cooperative tendencies, using a game-theoretic approach gleaned from Halevy et al. 2012.<br><br>The survey was administered to two different target populations: a U.S. sample, with 1,108 viable responses, and a North Carolina sample with 960 viable responses. The questionnaire was programmed in Qualtrics and distributed through the third-party crowdsourcing company Academic Prolific (Peer, 2024). All participants over the age of 18 were allowed to participate and received payment for their participation at $10/hour, which translated to $4.33 per valid submission. All participants also signed a consent form explaining their participation was voluntary. After initial pilots, the final questionnaire was made available to participants on May 14, 2025 and data collection closed on July 17, 2025. On average, participants spent about 31 minutes answering the survey. The data does not contain personally identifiable information. <br>