The importance of collective and individual psychological ownership for safe sanitation: A multilevel analysis in rural Ghana

ABSTRACT

Unsafe sanitation practices can severely affect public health. Strengthening psychological ownership, the feeling of owning an object (e.g. the latrine) individually or collectively, may promote safe sanitation practices, e.g. decreased open defecation. This study investigated psychological ownership in communities that participated in a sanitation intervention. We used follow-up survey data of a cluster-randomised controlled trial in rural Ghana (N = 2012 households), which assessed psychological ownership, and safe sanitation outcomes. The data were analysed using multilevel modelling and generalised estimating equations. In line with our assumptions, greater psychological ownership for the latrine related to decreased open defecation. Higher individual psychological ownership for the open defecation space related to safe sanitation outcomes, whereas collective ownership related to lesser safe sanitation. The present study shows that the concept of psychological ownership may play an important role in safe sanitation. Collective and individual psychological ownership seem to distinctly relate to safe sanitation outcomes, which has high relevance for promoting communities’ health behaviour.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychological ownership
• psychosocial determinants of health behaviour
• safe sanitation
• community-led total sanitation
• community health interventions

Acknowledgements

We thank Global Communities for their support, the coordination and organisation of the intervention campaigns. We thank the District Assemblies Sawla Tuna Kalba and Bole for their broad support in this research project. We thank all field supervisors, data collectors and interns for their irreplaceable support during the field surveys. We also thank all study participants.

Disclosure statement

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

Declaration of interest

The authors declare no competing interests.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Please note that bush is not an appropriate term for the open defecation space in general as it might imply racist stereotypes. According to results from the qualitative pretest, it was only used to adapt wording to local languages.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (ID OPP1116717), the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (7F-09963.01.01) and USAID.