Consumers' concerns about food and health in Australia and New Zealand

Three studies were conducted in Australia and New Zealand to examine consumers' ratings of food and health concerns, the influence of sociodemographic factors on them, and the interrelationships between perceived concerns. Similar results were found in both countries. Principal-components analyses yielded several factors that suggested consumers in both countries perceived food and health issues along several key dimensions. These were related to concerns about food safety, food system issues, health, the environment and animal and human welfare. Generally, women expressed more concern than did men about most issues, while young people and highly educated people expressed least concern. These differences suggest that familiarity, perceived control and personal resources may have some influence on expressed concerns. However, other psychological influences remain to be identified since only small amounts of variance in the key dimensions were explained by the demographic variables. Comparisons of the rankings of the issues in the two New Zealand studies, administered 2 years apart, showed that they were very similar (ρ = 0.91, P < 0.0001) despite the use of different response scale wording. This supports the view that the population's evaluation of food issues may be enduring and suggests they are relatively independent of differences in elicitation questions.