Opportunity, motivation, and ability: how to increase people’s knowledge of pesticides and biocides

Abstract

As research of benefits and detriments of pesticides and biocides progresses, people’s knowledge needs to be updated. This study takes an audience perspective on how practitioners may improve communication. Through online focus group discussions of how and why Danes acquire knowledge of pesticides and biocides, we find that focusing on improving people’s knowledge structures, heuristics and self-efficacy may improve people’s ability to acquire such knowledge and in turn improve their motivation. This paper provides suggestions for how practitioners may create more effective communication.

Keywords:

• Communication
• pesticides
• knowledge
• opportunity
• motivation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Pro-environmental behavior is here defined as individual behavior that mitigates adverse consequences of environmental issues such as recycling plastic waste (Fogt Jacobsen et al., 2022).

2 A pre-study of 21 nationwide Danish newspapers across a span of a year (December 2019 to December 2020) found 717 articles containing ‘pesticides’ and 20 articles containing ‘biocides’. During the same period, 4,334 articles of the related issue of climate change/global warming were found.

3 Also known as MOA or AMO

Additional information

Funding

This paper was based on a study financially supported by the Danish Environmental Protection Agency (MST-667-00251).