The focus on diarrhoeal disease as a world wide health problem as demonstrated by recent efforts of international agencies has raised the question of the importance of social factors such as maternal knowledge and attitudes in explaining differential prevalence. Using data from an experimental outreach health delivery programme in Cali, Colombia, this article examines 583 randomly selected women with children 0-4 years of age representing a total population of approximately 70 000. With perceived diarrhoea as the outcome question mothers were questioned on 11 attitude indicators of maternal knowledge and practice about diarrhoeal disease, four indicators of individual socioeconomic status, three indicators of crowding, three of housing quality and two of family sanitary conditions. Results indicate significant elevated prevalence (chi 2 analysis) with 11 variables including knowledge of cause of diarrhoea, where to and how to treat diarrhoea, housing quality, mother's age, education and civil status, type of water service, and where parents were born. Logistic regression performed on variables with significant and near significant prevalence findings indicated that mother's perception of malnutrition in child, age of mother, house appearance, birthplace of mother and mother's general knowledge of diarrhoea were the most important predictive variables in descending order. Authors indicate that these conclusions suggest the importance of social and attitudinal variables in explaining differential diarrhoeal disease among a homogeneous, poor urban population and as such deserve more careful study.