**4. Discussion**

Our study examined patterns of in-home drinking water behavior and the degree to which it relates to perceptions of water and trust in water managers. We found that water behavior is best described by examining a range of drinking source choice patterns. Higher propensities to drink tap water were related to more positive perceptions of water quality and water utilities, including increased levels of trust in the water utility, more favorable evaluations of water quality, lower perceptions of risk, and lack of attention to salience to perceived changes in tap water.

### *4.1. Water Use Patterns: Characterizing Behavior*

Our characterization of residents' water drinking behavior into clusters reliant on one water source exclusively and clusters who mix their water sources helped capture patterns of behavior more thoroughly than a dichotomy (e.g., tap water vs. bottled water) would have. Less than half of our sample (42%) drank either bottled or tap water exclusively, although many respondents did indicate that they employed an exclusive water source. Much of the previous literature examining drinking water source choice reduced water use to a comparison between bottled water use and tap water use e.g., [21,39]. Our results showed that exclusive tap water drinkers have the largest differences in perceptions with exclusive bottled water drinkers across variables (Figure 4). Despite these differences, we found that a more detailed picture could be painted by including mixed clusters, which accounted for over one-third (36%) of the respondents' behavior. Looking at patterns of behavior recognizes that people may rely on multiple sources of drinking water at home.

Distinguishing between filter types was also useful as differences in perceptions of risk, trust, salience, and water quality depended on the type of household filter individuals employed. While some previous research has added exclusive household filter water drinkers to their study scope e.g., [41], we are unaware of other studies that differentiate between household filter types. In one example of this characterization of filter types, Leveque and Burns (2017) found that individuals who report higher risk perceptions of tap water are equally likely to drink household filtered water compared to tap [22]. In contrast, we found the appliance filter cluster to be one of the most similar clusters to tap water, while the sink filter and mixed cluster had some of the strongest differences of all clusters, topped only by the bottled water cluster. It may be important to distinguish between the type of household filter individuals employ as it can indicate vastly different perceptions with regard to drinking water and water municipalities.
