Abstract
In spite of the focus on improving treatment methods and determining the economic and environmental impacts of medical waste management, little research has been conducted to understand consumer perceptions of medical waste reduction. In healthcare setting, our research seeks to address this urgent need by investigating how visual cues can be used to elicit healthcare professionals’ willingness to reduce medical plastics. By employing the vignette-based experimental method, we collected data from 1,139 healthcare professionals to examine how visual characteristics (i.e., visual clutter, colorfulness, the presence of human face, the presence of animal) in images of medical plastic pollution were used to arouse moral shock and emotional energy in healthcare professionals. The results of our study suggest that visual displays should be cluttered, colorful, and characterized by human presence. By displaying these visuals in an image of anti-plastic pollution, healthcare professionals are most likely to express their sadness, rage, and despair, and enhance their intention to refuse medical plastics to the fullest extent. By contrast to the previous study, we found that healthcare professionals’ moral shock and willingness to refuse medical plastics were not significantly impacted by the presence of animals on the images.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 129650 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| Journal | Journal of Cleaner Production |
| Volume | 329 |
| Early online date | 9 Nov 2021 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 20 Dec 2021 |
Bibliographical note
NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Journal of Cleaner Production. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Journal of Cleaner Production, 329, (2021) DOI: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.129650© 2021, Elsevier. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Funding Information:
We thank the 2016 Department of Education of Guangdong Province Key Discipline ?Public Administration research project? for financing this project.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021
Funder
Funding Information: We thank the 2016 Department of Education of Guangdong Province Key Discipline ?Public Administration research project? for financing this project.Funding
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Department of Education of Guangdong Province |
Keywords
- Experimental design
- Healthcare
- Medical plastic waste
- Moral shock
- Visual elicitation
- General Environmental Science
- Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
- Strategy and Management
- Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Environmental Science
- Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
- Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
- Strategy and Management
