Eating styles of young females in Azerbaijan

Abstract

An epidemic of twenty-first century is overweight and obesity which is a consequence of inappropriate eating habits and sedentary lifestyle. Relying on statistical data overweight and obesity is a serious problem for young people, since the ratio of obese young people (below 35) is constantly increasing in the developed regions of the world. In an empirical research 419 adult females between 24 and 38 were questioned. The aim of the research was to segment Azerbaijan females belonging to Generation Y based on their eating behaviour. In order to measure eating behaviour the shorter version of Three Factor Eating Questionnaire (TFEQ-R 18) including 18 items was used. Relying on the results three main consumer groups can be distinguished, namely functional eaters (36.3%), conscious eaters (27.2%) and emotional and hedonic eaters (36.5%). Functional eaters have average level of income and bachelor degree. They are typically single. They do moderate physical activity and have normal weight based on their BMI. Conscious eaters have high level of income (over the average) and bachelor or master degree. The ratio of married and single women is almost the same among them. They do regularly sport, mainly once a week, or at least three times a week. They can be characterized by underweight or normal body weight. Emotional and hedonic eaters have low income level and associate or bachelor degree. They are single. They follow sedentary lifestyle; none of them do high level of physical activity and they have problems with their weight (overweight or obesity). Segmenting customers based on their eating styles are really useful for health sector, especially doctors, dietetics and psychologists since they can plan their assortment based on customers' needs or plan a personal diet.

Psycho-Behavioural Segmentation in Food and Nutrition: A Systematic Scoping Review of the Literature

“…The Food-Related Lifestyle instrument used in two studies [36,43] did not produce similar findings, except one segment from each that were indifferent to food-related lifestyle factors. The most similar outcomes between studies were those using the TFEQ for segmentation (n = 3) [27,38]. Despite having a different number of segments generated from cluster analysis, the three studies using the TFEQ all found a segment with a low tendency to emotionally eat-the 'rational' segment (in two studies) [27] and the 'conscious' segment [38].…”

“…Study populations ranged from n = 73 to n = 3085 participants aged between 18 years and 85+ years. The majority of studies included both male and female participants (n = 28) [13,[26][27][28][32][33][34][35][36][37][39][40][41][42][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54], however one had females only [38], and one did not specify sex or gender [43]. The studies included were from a range of countries such as Australia (n = 4) [13,33,47,54], Chile (n = 3) [48][49][50], and Croatia (n = 2) [32,42], and were published in a range of journals from public health, nutrition, and social marketing disciplines.…”

“…The majority of studies (n = 22) recruited adult volunteers or did not specify whether participants were incentivised to complete the study [13,26,28,[32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46]51,52], five studies paid or incentivised participants on completion of the study [27,47,53,54], and three studies recruited student samples from universities without stating whether they were incentivised or volunteers [48][49][50]. Inclusion criteria for the studies were variable, the most common criteria requiring participants to be at least 18 years old [26,34,35,37,42,44,46,47,[51][52][53][54].…”

“…All included studies used post-hoc segmentation, meaning segments were generated after data collection rather than pre-defined before the research study began. The number of segments varied between studies; most found three segments (n = 14) [26,28,33,36,38,40,41,[45][46][47]49,50,54], followed by four (n = 10) [27,32,34,35,39,43,44,48,53], two (n = 5) [13,28,37,51,52], and five (n = 1; Table 1) [42]. A majority of the studies (n = 24) used cluster analysis as their method of segmentation [13,[26][27][28][32][33][34][35][38][39][40][41][42][43]45,[47][48][49][50]…”

“…The most commonly used existing tool for segmentation was the Food Choice Questionnaire (FCQ; n = 6) [56], which recognises the influence of many factors such as sensory appeal, health, convenience, and familiarity on an individual's food choice [26,32,34,35,42]. The Three Factor Eating Questionnaire (TFEQ) [27,38] was used in three studies, and both the modified version of the Food-Related Lifestyle Instrument [57] and the Mealtime Functionality Questionnaire [32] were used in two studies [36,43]. Other tools used for segmentation were the Family Eating Habits Questionnaire [48], Food Choice Values Questionnaire [53], and the Health and Taste Attitude Scale [46] (Table 1).…”