A Best–Worst Measure of Attitudes toward Buying Seabream and Seabass Products: An Application to the Island of Gran Canaria

Abstract

Attitudes are important key drivers that affect consumers’ seafood consumption. The present investigation used a best–worst scaling approach to measure the level of importance and satisfaction of consumers’ attitudes towards the purchase of seabream and seabass in Gran Canaria (Spain). The investigation also compared the results of the best–worst scaling (BWS) approach with those of the traditional Likert-scale method and offers a different perspective of the results using an Importance–Satisfaction Analysis (ISA). The results indicate that the most important attributes concerned the hygiene and safety of the product, the health benefits, the freshness, the taste and the nutrients. At the same time, these attributes were ranked as those which satisfied consumers the most. However, some of the results obtained from the methodologies differed. The results suggest that, in the Likert-scale task, respondents might be overstating the importance and satisfaction of the attributes; while in the BWS, consumers were forced to evaluate a trade-off in the selection of the best and worst attributes in each scenario, so the task impeded, in principle, to define every attribute as very important and providing a high satisfaction. As a result, we consider that BWS offers more reliable and clearer results than traditional Likert-scale experiments.

How Do Italian Consumers Value Sustainable Certifications on Fish?—An Explorative Analysis

“…The BW average scores for the whole sample are reported in Table 4, and show that consumers, on average, place a large emphasis on fish taste (with the highest BW average score of 1.50), which is the most relevant feature driving fish purchases. The results confirm the importance of sensory features in consumer fish selection, as reported in previous studies [17,18,36,38,40]. The country of origin of fish products was ranked in second place in terms of importance (0.62) for consumers during their fish purchasing process.…”

“…The number of items in a single choice set and the number of choice sets depend on the total number of items, and are determined by the experimental design. The BWM approach to discovering consumer preferences for food products has been widely applied in the food marketing literature, e.g., [24,[32][33][34][35][36]. The current BWM experiment exhibits a balanced incomplete block design (12,4,3,1) (Note: the choice set contains 12 choices, there are 4 repetitions per level, 3 is the number of items in each choice set, and the pair frequency is 1), i.e., there are 9 items included in the analysis, and these are divided into 12 choice sets with 3 items each, and every attribute appears 4 times in the choice sets.…”