Journal article
Clean vs green: the impact of reading short stories on sustainable and healthy cleaning behaviours
- Abstract:
- Fact-based information campaigns aimed at encouraging more sustainable behaviour have typically resulted in minor effects that tend not to last. Scholars in the fields of entertainment education have proposed storytelling as an alternative strategy. Most existing studies have focused on health communication, but there is increasing interest in exploring storytelling to promote pro-environmental behaviours. Our focus in this study are behaviours which have both health and environmental implications: personal cleaning, household cleaning, and laundry. In a study using both quantitative and qualitative analyses (from a survey to which 77 individuals responded), we find that messages embedded into a short story significantly changed behavioural intentions in readers across all three domains. Readers reported gaining knowledge from the stories, in terms of the specific products and practices that one could undertake and with respect to the commonly held misconception that aggressive cleaning practices in the home (e.g., high temperatures, strong chemicals) are beneficial to human health. Results have implications for interventions aimed at promoting behaviours that have joint benefits for human and environmental health.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 715.4KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1007/s43621-024-00550-6
Authors
+ University of Southampton
More from this funder
- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/01ryk1543
- Programme:
- Interdisciplinary Research Pump-Priming Fund
- Publisher:
- Springer
- Journal:
- Discover Sustainability More from this journal
- Volume:
- 5
- Issue:
- 1
- Article number:
- 356
- Publication date:
- 2024-10-26
- Acceptance date:
- 2024-10-07
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2662-9984
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
2375695
- Local pid:
-
pubs:2375695
- Source identifiers:
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W4403785637
- Deposit date:
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2026-04-21
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- McIlroy et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2024
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2024. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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