Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 18 Document Number: D10474
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126 pages., ISBN: 9780438013049, Via ProQuest Dissertations and Theses., Genetically modified foods and crops are a topic of heated debate in the United States. As with all issues, messaging has the potential to influence and change an individual’s attitude. Through the lens of social judgment theory, this quasi-experimental study investigated the influence of an evidence-based message on millennial agricultural students’ attitudes towards genetically modified foods and crops, while taking into account participants’ ego-involvements for the issue. Sixty-nine undergraduate students in the College of Agriculture participated in this study – comprised of a pre-test and post-test questionnaire with an evidence-based message intervention between.
The major finding from this study was that for the issue of genetically modified foods, millennial agricultural students’ with high ego-involvement are capable of attitude change and moving their anchor points in the direction of viewing genetically modified foods and crops less favorably than prior to the evidence-based message intervention. This result was unexpected, but important. Another key finding is that the majority of millennial agricultural students reported holding favorable attitudes towards genetically modified foods. In regards to the risks of genetically modified foods, the majority of participants disagreed that there is any risk associated with eating genetically modified foods and were neutral towards any environmental risks of genetically modified crops. This study also investigated the role of ego-involvement and the widths of the latitudes of acceptance, noncommitment, and rejection. While there was a trend for the latitude of acceptance to increase and for the latitude of rejection to decrease for both the high and low ego-involvement groups, these findings were insignificant.
Overall, this study’s findings provides great insight to science communicators who are messaging with the goal of influencing attitude change. Utilizing key elements of science communication including, weight of evidence reporting, weight of experts reporting, reinforcement of self-identity, credibility, valence, and framing theory, it is possible to influence attitude change, at least for millennial agricultural students with high ego-involvement for the issue of genetically modified foods. Future research should expand to include other segments of the population, as well as other science issues.
21 pages., New trends in food consumption are shaping consumers’ preferences and buying behavior. Non-traditional food retailing and short supply chains (SSCs) are offering bundles of attributes that fit the needs of larger consumers’ segments. Several studies have analyzed factors affecting the choice of traditional and non-traditional food retailing. Very few, however, are those studies that analyze the predictive role of human values and attitudes on the choice of traditional and non-traditional food retailing and supply chains. Usually, due to the low percentage of consumers involved in SSC, analyses of consumer behavior have been conducted using convenience samples. This study, based on online questionnaires submitted to a representative sample composed by 1009 German consumers, tests the hypothesis that the frequency of purchases at farmers’ markets is related to human values: attitude toward the industrialized food market and attitude toward the environment. The econometric approach here implemented computes the model on average and in the tails of the dependent variable, frequency of purchases at farmers’ market, thus investigating the model in a representative sample even where the percentage of non-traditional food retailing consumers is low, as occurs in the tails for low/high frequency of purchases. The questionnaire included the Schwartz value survey, attitudes toward environment and attitude toward industrialized food market, and self-reported estimates of the frequency of buying at farmers’ market. Results suggest that the frequency of buying at farmers’ markets is hierarchically related to attitudes and values. The frequency of purchases at farmers’ markets is negatively related to industrialized food attitudes and positively related to pro-environment attitudes. Attitudes are in turn affected by values: self-transcendence has a positive impact on pro-environment attitude and the reverse is true for conservation. Furthermore, these relationships are not constant in the sample: they change according to the selected frequency of purchases.
20 pages, Food consumers are increasingly searching for emotions and values when purchasing and consuming food. They search for products that ensure social and environmental sustainability, in addition to more common extrinsic product attributes, such as price, packaging, origin, and brand. In particular, there is increasing interest in product price fairness. The current study aims at exploring consumers’ perception and understanding of price fairness, focusing on the processed tomato products agro-food chain. The study interviewed 832 people. Data were collected through an online questionnaire with the support of Qualtrics software, and data elaboration was carried out with Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS). The elaboration includes an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) to identify existing latent factors in the consumers’ perception of enabling agro-food system elements influencing farmers’ reception of fair prices. Then, factor mean values were cross-analysed with socio-economic characteristics and processed tomato consumption habits with Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). Results support the idea that consumers are limitedly aware of the processed tomato agro-food chain dynamics and consider farmers as the most unfairly remunerated partner. Women and frequently purchasing consumers of processed tomato products believe farmers should be treated more fairly. There is a difference between what consumers perceive as fair price distribution and actual price distribution among processed tomato chain actors. Further studies may focus on how fairness attribute impacts on consumer purchasing behaviour.
12 pages., Accessed via UI subscription, Summary of the journal article., How young Polish consumers perceive the selected sources of information on foodstuffs. Also examines their comprehension, hierarchy of importance and use of labels on food products.
