The Sound Behavior Index: A Management Tool for Behavioral Aspects of Ecosystem Restoration

Abstract

With growing numbers of programs devoted to environmental behavior change, there is a corresponding need for measures of behavior change at a variety of scales. In this article, we describe the “Sound Behavior Index,” an ongoing behavior change measure developed for the Puget Sound region. It tracks 28 residential-scale practices that can affect water quality and aquatic habitat. The index is based on a survey conducted every two years among a statistical sample of the region's 4.5 million residents. It asks about specific, measurable, repetitive behaviors that are driven by personal choice. The Sound Behavior Index distills the region's environmental performance into a single regional score, which can be tracked across time. The index can be broken down to the county level, providing more meaningful local measures. It can also be used to track each component behavior. Until now, there have been no uniform behavior change measures in the region, no regional measures, and no consistent local measures aside from one county. The Sound Behavior Index fills those gaps by measuring long-term shifts in environmental behaviors across the Puget Sound region.

Keywords:

• behavior
• evaluation
• index
• monitoring
• Puget Sound
• social marketing
• water quality

Notes

The authors express gratitude to the developers of the EBI, in particular, to Michael Jacobson and Richard Gelb of King County, for their foundational work. The lessons of the EBI experience made the SBI better than it otherwise would have been.

Using the approved American Association of Public Opinion Research approach, response rate is defined as the number of completed surveys plus partial or suspended surveys divided by the number of completed surveys, plus partial or suspended surveys, plus qualified refusals, plus break‐offs, plus no answer, plus busy signal, plus answering machine, plus soft refusals, plus hard refusals, plus scheduled callbacks, plus unspecified callbacks.

Cooperation rate is defined as the number of completed surveys divided by the number of completed surveys plus refusals plus break-offs. Therefore, it is the percent of those contacted who qualified and who completed the survey.

Data analysis is underway as of press time.