Does the food environment influence dietary preference of people reflected through twitter in Scotland?
View/ Open
Final_Dissertation.pdf (1.894Mb)
Date
11/2020Author
Cheng, Shifan
Metadata
Abstract
Dietary health is an increasingly concerning topic related to public. The dietary choice is essential to health. Before fostering dietary behaviours, learning about current food preference of people is necessary. A map from the geographical perspective may provide new insights at this topic. In terms to the reason behind food-related behaviours, many factors work to it, such as economic status, food educational level, cultural background, and food environment. However, conclusions drawn from studies about relationships between foodscapes and food choices were contradictory. The result varied in different countries and even in various regions within one country. In this paper, we would stream tweets from twitter to map the food preference of 32 council areas in Scotland and examine whether the food environment is associated with food choices. Since Scottish people relied mainly on supermarkets to obtain food resources, we adopted the number of supermarkets within a buffered area and the distance to the nearest supermarket as foodscape metrics. A linear regression model was used to examine the association between the food environment and food preferences. We found that there is no apparent spatial pattern in the distribution of food preference across the country, and the food environment is not associated with individual preferences in Scotland.