Consumer Preferences for Local Food: Testing an Extended Norm Taxonomy

Abstract

Consumer attitudes toward consuming and buying locally produced food are well studied. By contrast, the topic of consumer preferences for local food, with a special emphasis on the role of norms, still lacks empirical evidence. To study the influence of norms and morals on the intention to buy local food products, a quantitative study (N = 327) focusing on external social and internalized moral norms was conducted using the constructs of the theory of planned behavior in combination with an extended norm taxonomy and the perceived consumer effectiveness measure. The norm constructs consisted of two different personal norms, integrated and introjected, and two social norms, descriptive and injunctive. In a factor analysis, two factors for social norms but only one for personal norms were obtained. Multiple regressions explained 50 percent of the variance in intentions and 29 percent of the variance in past behavior. Norm constructs were proven important in the model, as personal norms had the largest effect among all constructs on intentions, and descriptive norms strongly influenced past behavior. An additional mediation analysis showed that personal norms were internalized social injunctive norms and that intentions mediated the relationship between all constructs. The implications of the findings and recommendations for future research are given accordingly.

All by myself? Testing descriptive social norm-nudges to increase flood preparedness among homeowners

“…Third, policy makers should pay particular attention to activating personal norms that were found to be associated with flood risk preparedness (as indicated by the strong correlation of personal norms with investments in flood preparedness in Figure 8). These results are in line with Wenzig and Gruchmann (2018), who showed that personal norms generally have a much larger influence on proenvironmental behavior than social norms, and with Botzen et al (2019b), who showed that personal norms matter more than social norms in a flood risk context. Schwartz (2012) argued that norms need to be activated to be able to influence intention or behavior by being aware of the consequences of actions and feeling responsible.…”

Local Entrepreneurship in the Context of Food Production: A Review

“…While in the research conducted by Wenzing and Gruchmann [58], who studied preferences of consumers vis-à-vis local food, (327 respondents took part in the research) the researchers demonstrated that respondents have some limitations when it comes to buying local food that are related to lack of knowledge in this area.…”

Consumer Habits of Local Food: Perspectives from Northern Sweden

“…This technique is widely used by researchers to observe the variables that characterise consumer behaviour [65,[71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82].…”

“…After performing MCA, a hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) was conducted for validation [69,70]. In the HCA, a hierarchical grouping was performed then optimised with K-means clustering [76,78]. The analyses were performed using IBM SPSS Statistics (version 20).…”