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ZonMW Microplastics & Citizens

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Four linked datasets from Dutch public and expert surveys and a gaming intervention capture psychological drivers, policy acceptance, and behavioral intentions related to microplastic exposure and pollution. This citizen science and behavioral research infrastructure is valuable for understanding how public awareness and education tools can shift individual behaviors that contribute to microplastic emissions.

Four datafiles are present here linked with four studies: (1) A survey with a Dutch Representative sample to investigate people's knowledge on microplastics (MPs), acceptance towards policies aimed to tackle MP pollution, habits related to MPs emission and exposure and psychological drivers related to intention to engage in MP-protective behaviors (2) A survey with experts on MPs to investigate their perceived effectiveness of different indoor MP-preventive actions and their concern about indoor MP pollution (3) An online experiment on the effect of playing a game on MPs (control vs experimental group) on several psychological drivers related to intention to engage in MP-protective behaviors (4) A follow-up of the online experiment two weeks after game play to investigate people's reported changes and feedback on the game All data have been collected on Qualtrics. The raw data here have been anonymized and variables have been renamed to improve clarity. In the first dataset five variables (indicated with “_R”) have been recoded to account for reverse-worded scale items. In the second dataset (with experts) gender and country of residence were also removed to prevent participants from being re-identifiable.

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