Personal Values As An Explanation Of Food Usage Habits

Abstract

This study investigated the existence of a relationship between personal values and consumer food habits, and compared the explanatory power of values with that of life‐style measures and demographics. Personal values were measured in terms of the importance of 20 items selected from England's Personal Values Questionnaire. Life‐ style items reflected frequency of participation in 20 leisure time activities, and demo graphics comprised 22 measures of socioeconomic characteristics and media preferences. Usage rates for 13 popular beverages were used to represent food habits. Respondents were clustered into four relatively homogeneous usage groups. Then, both univariate ANOVA and multivariate discriminant analysis were employed to test for the hypoth esized relationships between the consumers' food habits and values, life‐style, and demographics. The univariate tests indicated the three sets of variables have fairly equivalent explanatory power. However, the multivariate results showed values and demographic variables to surpass the life‐style variables with respect to the statistical significance and interpretability of the discriminant functions that were derived. While the explanatory power of values was thereby supported, ideally a combination of types of variables should be used to best explain food habits.

From qualitative to quantitative: Development of an instrument to assess food choice influences of young adults

“…In addition, some studies have found a within-person approach, rather than an across-person approach, to give more accurate predictions or descriptions of behavior (Contento, Michela and Goldberg, 1988;Davidson and Morrison, 1983). Several studies (Akin et al, 1986;Contento, Michela and Goldberg, 1988;Granzin and Bahn, 1982;Haines, Popkin and Guilkey 1990) examining food consumption patterns or exploring motivation or values behind food use have found cluster analysis useful to identify group characteristics. The revised survey was designed so that cluster analysis could be performed.…”