College and university dining services administrators' intention to adopt sustainable practices

Abstract

This study examined college and university dining services administrators' (CUDSAs) intention to adopt sustainable practices. The theory of planned behavior (TPB) including constructs of subjective norm, attitude, perceived behavior control, and personal norm, formed the theoretical framework. A web-based questionnaire was developed, pretested, and distributed to 535 CUDSAs in the U.S.A. Results indicated that subjective norm (pressure from others) had the most influence on CUDSAs' intention to adopt sustainable practices, followed by attitude and personal norm. Including the personal norm construct in the TPB model reduced unexplained variance by 33.48%. Limitations of this research are generalizability of results due to use of a sample of U.S.A. members of a professional organization (National Association of College and University Food Services) and low response rate. Results suggest that pressure from college administrators and students has the greatest impact on CUDSAs' decisions to adopt sustainable practices. The question of why some university dining operations are models for sustainability and others have few sustainable practices has not been explored. The dining services director plays a key role in determining sustainability efforts for that operation. This research explored factors influencing a director's intention to adopt sustainable practices.

Sustainability in Hospital Foodservice

“…Although the TPB has been tested on ecological behavior in one's personal life (Harland, Staats, & Wilke, 1999;Kaiser & Gutscher, 2003), only one study, conducted with college and university foodservice directors, applied the TPB to sustainable practice decisions by foodservice directors in their operations. Those results, reported by Chen, Gregoire, Arendt, and Shelley (2011), suggested that subjective norm and attitude toward sustainable practices had the greatest influence on intention to adopt sustainable practices in the future.…”

“…Eight dietetics program faculty and hospital foodservice managers served as an expert panel to review the questionnaire to assure questions used by Chen et al (2010Chen et al ( , 2011 for college and university foodservice directors were appropriate for hospitals and to confirm content validity as described by Worthen, Borg, and White (1993). Minor wording changes, such as changing the term "university administrators" to "hospital administrators," were made.…”

“…Also included were questions developed by Chen et al (2011) to assess the six constructs proposed in the TPB research model (see Figure 1): intention to adopt sustainable practices, subjective norm, perceived behavior control, attitude toward sustainable practices, personal norm, and past experience with sustainable practices. Foodservice directors' intention to adopt general sustainable practices in their operation in the next year was measured by one item rated on a 7-point scale ranging from 1 (extremely unlikely) to 7 (extremely likely).…”

Greening the Ivory Tower: A Review of Educational Research on Sustainability in Post-Secondary Education

“…Many university dining services are beginning to draw on the supply chain principles of restaurants and grocery stores that look to source their food stocks sustainably. This has been in large part due to student pressure on universities' administrations [56,57].…”

Exploring School Foodservice Directors’ Intentions to Implement Farm-To-School Procurement Methods Considering Food Safety Practices

“…Stokes, Arendt, and Strohbehn (2014), in a study about foodservice employee's perceptions about F2S, found that school foodservice employee's perceived that getting support from parents and students were equally important, in implementing F2S programs (n = 199-211). In another study, customers were noted as important to influencing decisions to implement sustainable practices, such as local purchasing, in colleges and university foodservice (Chen, Arendt, & Gregoire, 2011). School FSDs indicated a strong willingness to try to procure using alternative methods, yet their actual ability to procure alternatively was weaker, possibly indicating a lack of capacity to change their process.…”