Socio-Economic Determinants Of Health and Food Safety Related Risk Perceptions

Individual and societal perceptions of food-related health risks are multidimensional and complex. Social, political, psychological and economic factors interact with technological factors and affect perceptions in complicated ways. Understanding the determinants of risk perception will aid in food and agricultural policy development and implementation. Previous research finds that the major attributes of risk perceptions include socioeconomic variables like income, age, and gender, and that elements of the risk like public and personal exposure and the individual's control over the risk, knowledge of it and its severity are significant determinants of risk perception. Most of these past results are based on two way comparisons and factor analysis. The objective of this paper is to analyse the significance of socioeconomic determinants of risk perceptions concerning food safety. We use a multivariate approach which holds all other variables constant when determining the significance of each variable. This methodology will allow us to investigate the significance of determinants like parenthood, employment status, and household responsibilities which have been identified in earlier research but not investigated empirically (Davidson and Freundenberg 1996). A further objective of this paper is to analyze the sensitivity and stability of the socioeconomic factors affecting risk perception (Learner 1983, 1985) and to determine the robustness of the results over a two year period. There are three major findings in this study. The first is that most of the results in our multivariate context are generally consistent with earlier bivariate analysis. The second result, however, indicates that there are significant differences between the results of the two data sets, one from 1994 and the second from 1995. Thirdly, there is considerable variation in which variables are significant except for gender which is robust across all classes of goods and time periods.