AcknowledgementsMany individuals have contributed intellectually to this book. The literature on discrete choice analysis, combining sources of preference data and experimental design, is vast, with a history spanning at least sixty years. This book is a contribution to that literature, inspired by a need at the end of the twentieth century for a single source accessible to both practitioners and researchers who need some assistance in`travelling' through the essential components of the extant literature in order to undertake an appropriate systematic study of consumer choice behaviour.To Daniel McFadden, Norman Anderson and Moshe Ben-Akiva we owe a special debt for their contribution to the literature and for their inspiration to all authors. Wiktor Adamowicz and graduate students and sta in the Faculty of Economics and Business at the University of Sydney read earlier versions of the book and guided us in revisions. The in¯uence of a number of other colleagues has been substantial in our appreciation of the topic. We especially thank

Individual and societal perceptions of food-related health risks are multidimensional and complex. Social, political, psychological, and economic factors interact with technological factors and affect perceptions in complex ways. Previous research found that the significant determinants of risk perceptions include socioeconomic and behavioral variables. Most of these past results are based on two-way comparisons and factor analysis. The objective of this study was to analyze the significance of socioeconomic determinants of risk perceptions concerning health and food safety. A multivariate approach was used and the results were compared with earlier bivariate results to determine which socioeconomic predictors were robust across methods. There were two major findings in this study. The first was that the results in the multivariate models were generally consistent with earlier bivariate analysis. That is, variables such as household income, number of children, gender, age, and voting preferences were strong predictors of an individual's risk perceptions. The second result was that the gender of the respondent was the only variable found to be robust across all three classes of health and food safety issues across two time periods.

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