Online information acquisition affects food risk prevention behaviours: the roles of topic concern, information credibility and risk perception

BACKGROUND

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only brought great challenges to the global health system but also bred numerous rumours about food safety. Food safety issues have once again attracted public attention.

METHODS

The data were drawn from the fifth wave of the first Taiwan Communication Survey database. The respondents were selected via multistage stratified random sampling. The sampling units were townships/districts, villages/neighbourhoods and households. The sample consisted of 2098 respondents. This study first used propensity value matching to analyse the direct impact of online food safety information acquisition on preventive behaviours and examined the heterogeneous impact caused by the difference in the degree of topic attention through value matching. Hayes' PROCESS macro model 6 was applied to confirm the mediating effect and the serial mediating effect.

RESULTS

The research results show that an increase in the frequency of the acquisition of online food safety information significantly increases individuals' food risk prevention behaviour. However, only users with high concern about the issue are affected. The food risk prevention behaviour of users with low concern about this issue is not affected by the acquisition of online food safety information. Further analysis shows that risk perception and information credibility both play mediating roles in the impact of online food safety information acquisition on food risk prevention behaviour. Moreover, the transmission and united effects of information credibility and risk perception play a distal mediating role.

CONCLUSIONS

Food risk prevention behaviours are an important topic for personal health as well as government management. Our study's findings can provide empirical evidence for risk managers and decision-makers to reevaluate the role of the internet in food risk management.

How did consumers’ self-protective behavior formed during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Introduction

This study explored the formation mechanism of consumers’ self-protective behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic, which is very important for policy settings to regulate consumer behavior. Based on the basic framework of the Protective Action Decision Model (PADM), this study analyzed the formation mechanism of consumers’ self-protective willingness from the perspective of risk information, and explained the deviation between consumers’ self-protective willingness and behavior from the perspective of protective behavior attributes.

Methods

Based on 1,265 consumer survey data during the COVID-19 pandemic, the empirical test was carried out.

Results and Discussion

The amount of risk information has a significant positive impact on the consumers’ self-protective willingness, where the credibility of risk information plays a positive moderating role between them. Risk perception plays a positive mediating role between the amount of risk information and the consumers’ self-protective willingness, and the positive mediating effect of risk perception is negatively moderated by the credibility of risk information. In the protective behavior attributes, hazard-related attributes play a positive moderating role between the consumers’ self-protective willingness and behavior, while resource-related attributes play the opposite role. Consumers pay more attention to hazard-related attributes than resource-related attributes, and they are willing to consume more resources to reduce risk.

The Influence of Social Capital on Protective Action Perceptions Towards Hazardous Chemicals

The stigmatized character of hazardous chemicals has caused individuals in hazards to take excessive protective actions. Here, social capital is introduced to discuss its influence on the protective action decision model (PADM), considering this variable has a relatively high individual trust level in regards to information on hazardous chemicals. A model was constructed by taking protective action perceptions as the dependent variable, social capital as the independent variable, the pre-decision process as the mediating variable, and socioeconomic status as the moderating variables. Data were collected with a neighborhood sampling method, and a total of 457 questionnaires were obtained from neighboring residents near a large cold ammonia storage house in Haidian District, Beijing. Results: While the family and friendship networks produced a larger positive influence, the kinship network produced a smaller positive influence; furthermore, the influence of social capital must be brought through the pre-decision process; finally, socioeconomic status has a directional moderation on the friendship network, an enhancing moderation on the kinship network, and a weakening moderation on the family network.