A stage model as an analysis framework for studying voluntary change in food choices – The case of beef consumption reduction in Norway
Section snippets
Behavior change modeling
Though there is a general lack of process-based approaches to study food consumption changes, there is a limited number of studies that take a change perspective on beef or meat consumption changes. Horwath (1999) discusses the benefits and challenges of the transtheoretical model (Prochaska, DiClemente, & Norcross, 1992) for describing changes in eating behavior and concludes that the transtheoretical model is particularly useful for describing changes between food categories such as shifting
Research question of the present study
The behavior change model described above has been applied in a number of behavioral domains and received empirical support (Bamberg, 2007, Bamberg, 2013a, Bamberg, 2013b, Klöckner, 2014). However, to my knowledge it has not been applied specifically to beef consumption or to modeling several behavioral alternatives simultaneously in stages 2–4. The research question for this study is therefore, can the stage model of self-regulated change describe the beef consumption and consumption of beef
Methods
Two surveys were conducted to gather data for the analyses presented in the following section. Measurement instruments were identical in both studies, but the recruitment technique was different. Whereas for the first survey (N = 746) a recruitment letter was sent to a random sample from the Norwegian population registry, the second survey (N = 2967) utilized a representative online panel for the Norwegian population operated by TNS Gallup.
For the first survey, 30,000 randomly selected
Results
All analyses reported in the following sections were conducted with the structural equation modeling software Mplus 7.4 (Muthén & Muthén, 1998–2012). A structural equation model was specified according to the structure displayed in Fig. 1. Separate analyses were run for the first and the second sample to test if both sample yield the same results. Fig. 1 displays the standardized regression weights (sample 1 in the first position, sample 2 in the second). Table 2, Table 3 report unstandardized
Discussion
The study presented in this paper applied to my knowledge for the first time the self-determination model of behavior change (Bamberg, 2013a, Bamberg, 2013b) to modeling change in food choices with different behavioral alternatives simultaneously. The study provides a number of important insights from a theoretical and practical perspective, both for the concrete case of beef consumption, but also for understanding self-regulated food choice change more generally. The stage model structure
Implications for consumer policy
In spite of the weaknesses discussed in the previous section, this study shows that the proposed stage model has a promising potential as a structuring framework for analyzing and supporting consumers in self-regulated diet changes. With the simple stage diagnostic (one question with five alternative answers to chose from – documented in Klöckner (2015)) it is possible to screen consumers for the stage of change they are in and provide them with the support they need for the progession to the
Acknowledgement
This research was funded by the Norwegian Research Council (project number 207776).
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