Developing a Measure of Trust in Recycled Water

ABSTRACT Trust is one major factor that predicts public acceptance of recycled water. However, currently, there exist several measures of trust in recycled water entities (e.g., Trust in Water Providers and Trust in Aquifer Managers). The current research compared prominent measures of trust in recycled water entities. Results indicated that there were meaningful differences among trust measures both in relation to each other and with respect to predicting outcomes (e.g., recycled water acceptance). The current paper reports a study that attempted to understand those potential differences and found that some differences can be categorized as measuring Trust in Water Authorities to Provide Safe Water, Trust in Water Authorities to Mange Risks and Trust in Governments. Given those categorizations, this research presents a nine‐item instrument that can be used to measure those three trust factors. This study provided evidence for the instrument's validity using participants recruited on CloudResearch ( N = 292). The trust factors in this nine‐item measure predicted important outcome variables including acceptance of recycled water even after controlling for domain general trust and disgust sensitivity. The measure provides one common way to measure elements of trust in recycled water, offers the opportunity to compare results of trust in recycled water across studies and potentially helps partially explain differences in the magnitude of trust's relation to recycled water acceptance.