Determinants of economic motivations for food choice: insights for the understanding of consumer behaviour : research article

Abstract

Food consumption involves several dimensions, being some of them directly associated with the consumers’ characteristics. The interrelationships between these domains impact consumer behaviour for food choice and the consequent decisions for food consumption. In these frame works, economic motivations are determinant. On the other hand, the scientific literature high lights that the economic-based stimuli to choose food is still underexplored. In this perspective, the objective of this study was to assess the main sociodemographic and anthropometric deter minants of the economic motivations for food choice. For that, a questionnaire survey was car ried out involving 11,919 respondents from 16 countries. A validated questionnaire was used, translated into the native languages in all participating countries, using a back-translation pro cess. First, the information obtained was assessed through factor analysis to reduce the number of variables associated with the economic motivations and to identify indexes. After, and consid ering the indexes obtained as dependent variables, a classification and regression tree analysis was performed. As main insights, it is highlighted that the main determinants of the economic motivations are country of residence, age, gender, civil state, professional activity, educational level, living environment, responsibility for buying food, weight, height, body mass index, healthy diets and physical exercise practices. Additionally, the results also reveal that economic motiva tions may be associated with two indexes, one related to convenience attitudes and the other to quality concerns. Finally, the younger persons and the women are the social groups more con cerned with healthy diets and food quality. In conclusion, this work confirmed that food choice is to a high extent influenced by several sociodemographic and behavioural factors.