To Örebro University

This field experiment investigates the effect of first-time inspections of restaurants' waste sorting and explores whether motivational interviewing (MI) training of inspectors in this specific setting enhances the propensity of restaurants to be compliant with regulations. Our results show strong positive effects of first inspections with an average improvement of 55%. Also, the MI training of inspectors seems to affect compliance. However, this may also be a combined effect of the first inspection, MI training and more days between inspections. Further research is needed.

High hygienic standards are essential to avoid the spread of infectious diseases, not least in environments with many children. This paper uses an experimental design to examine the impact of feedback information following a public health safety inspection on future behavior of pre-schools in three Swedish municipalities. We find no effects of information at the municipality level. However, we find that pre-schools that were informed about a bad result improved more than comparable pre-schools that received no feedback. Conversely, informed pre-schools with a good result worsened their results compared to similarly performing uninformed pre-schools. Our results thus lend support to the so called boomerang effect.

In this study we report how the communicative method “Motivational Interviewing” (MI) is adapted to the context of health safety inspections. The principal aim is to analyze the effect of MI training on inspectors’ communicative skills and to discuss the outcome in relation to a previous study that involved training of inspectors in a broader context. A further aim of this study is to explore whether it is possible to establish an effect of MI-trained inspectors on property owners’ compliance with the request for reporting radon gas radiation measurement results.