Attitudes Related to Food Safety Behavior Among Students in Sweden

• Introduction: It has earlir been shown through an online questionnaire performed on 606 students from 24 different Swedish universities that the foremost sources of food safety knowledge were family and friends. However, more than a third of the students had experienced food safety education which was shown to provide knowledge and promoted more optimal food safety behavior.Purpose: Self-reported food safety attitudes, knowledge and behaviour among university students in Sweden were investigated through multivariate path analysis in order to identify factors' influence on behavior.Methods: A nationwide web-based questionnaire targeting university students in Sweden was distributed through social media, email and various university contacts. A structural equation model was applied on statistics from the questionnaire. Four factors: Background, Knowledge, Attitude and Behavior were derived from the data. The factors, built up from variables with sufficient factor loadings were set up in a predetermined structure. The structure was based on whether background affects knowledge and whether knowledge affects behavior and attitude, and whether attitude affects behavior. The structure has been confirmed valid in previous studies done.Results: The factor loadings were ranging from -1 to 1 where the closer to 1 indicates a stronger loading. Background affected knowledge (0.841). Attitude has a stronger influence on the Behavior (0.457) than Knowledge (0.278). However, Knowledge has  directly a strong effect on Attitude (0.606). Out of 606 respiondents, 408 answers were deemed usable for the analysis. More than half of the variables have sufficient loadings to their respective factors to be included. The goodness-of-fit indices, indicated that the model had a good fit to the data, and this including hypothesis testing with a significance of < 0.005.Significance: It can be confirmed that background such as attending a food safety education strongly influenced knowledge. Knowledge in turns strongly affects attitudes but it does not directly affect bahavior. Thus, attitudes seemed to have a mediating role between food safety knowledge and behavior.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Annan samhällsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Other Social Sciences (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Food safety

Attitudes

Behavior

Mikrobiologi

Microbiology

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)