The Development of a Public Bathroom Perception Scale

Guido Corradi, Eduardo Garcia-Garzon and Juan Ramón Barrada
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Guido Corradi: Departamento de Psicología, Facultad Salud, Universidad Camilo José Cela, 28692 Madrid, Spain
Eduardo Garcia-Garzon: Departamento de Psicología, Facultad Salud, Universidad Camilo José Cela, 28692 Madrid, Spain
Juan Ramón Barrada: Departamento de Psicología y Sociología, Universidad de Zaragoza, 44003 Teruel, Spain

IJERPH, 2020, vol. 17, issue 21, 1-14

Abstract: Public bathrooms are sensible locations in which individuals confront an intimate environment outside the comfort of their own home. The assessment of public bathrooms is especially problematic for people whose illnesses make them more prone to needing this service. Unfortunately, there is a lack in the evaluation of the elements that are relevant to the user’s perspective. For that reason, we propose a new scale to assess these elements of evaluation of public bathrooms. We developed a scale of 14 items and three domains: privacy, ease of use and cleanliness. We tested the factor validity of this three-factor solution ( n = 654) on a sample of healthy individuals and 155 respondents with a bowel illness or other affection that reported to be bathroom-dependent. We found that bathroom-dependent people value more privacy and cleanliness more than their healthy counterparts. We additionally found a gender effect on the scale: female participants scored higher in every domain. This study provides the first scale to assess value concerning public bathrooms and to highlight the relevance of different bathrooms’ aspects to users.

Keywords: health psychology; environment evaluation; psychometrics; scale development; well-being; bathrooms; inflammatory bowel diseases (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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