Progress 10/01/19 to 09/30/20
Outputs
Target Audience:Maine CDC, Agricultural Council of Maine (AGCOM (provides a forum for all statewide agricultural organizations to meet and discuss how to move Maine food and farming forward)) Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?
Nothing Reported
How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?
Nothing Reported
What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?
Nothing Reported
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
Unsafe food-handling practices in the home are linked with foodborne illnesses that represent sizable costs on the US healthcare industry and welfare losses to households. Past consumer food-safety education programs have only been modestly successful. Optimism bias may distort food-safety risk perceptions encouraging participation in risky food behaviors. Using multiple years of the FDA Food Safety Survey data, we explore the link between behavior-specific risk perceptions and three food-handling practices: handwashing, avoiding cross-contamination, and proper refrigeration of cooked foods. Behavior-specific risk perceptions are important in increasing safe handwashing and avoiding cross-contamination but have no impact on safe refrigeration behavior. We hypothesize the difference between the refrigeration model and the other two models is due to a few factors. First, there may be a disconnect between food preparation behaviors (handwashing and avoiding cross-contamination) and food storage behavior (refrigeration). Second, general risk perceptions (i.e., the seriousness of germs) and cooking experience are correlated with all three behavior-specific risk perceptions, and they are correlated with handwashing and avoiding cross-contamination behavior; however, they are not correlated with safe refrigeration behavior. Together, this suggests refrigeration behavior is different than the other food-handling behaviors. Education effects - Higher levels of education decrease people's perceptions of risk from not washing one's hands and not avoiding cross-contamination (i.e., optimism bias appears to be higher among the well-educated). Conversely, when holding risk perceptions constant, individuals with higher education are more likely to wash their hands, avoid cross-contamination and follow safe refrigeration practices. The net effect indicates education has a zero net effect on encouraging safe handwashing and avoiding cross-contamination, while having a net positive impact on safe refrigeration). This education-risk perception result illustrates the potential drag of overconfidence in people's food handling. This result highlights the benefit of jointly estimating the equations as it identifies the negative relationship between education and risk perceptions. We can posit that an information campaign aimed at lowering more-educated people's overconfidence in their current behavior-specific risk perceptions have the potential of improving people's actual behavior, leading to a decrease in foodborne illness in the home. Gender - Males are more confident (lower risk perceptions) in their handwashing abilities and their ability to avoid cross-contamination compared to females. However, for a given level of risk perception, males are similar to females in their handwashing and refrigeration behaviors, but worse in avoiding cross-contamination. Again, a successful information campaign designed to decrease male's optimism in their current food-handling abilities would eliminate the gender difference in handwashing and cut in half the difference in avoiding cross-contamination - leading to an overall improvement in safe food handling. Age effects - There are no differences in the indirect effects of risk perceptions across age groups in either model, meaning any net behavioral effect is driven only by the direct risk-conditional effect across age groups; there is no direct or net effect in handwashing, a positive direct and net effect (four percentage points) on avoiding cross-contamination among people between the ages of 30 and 60years and a negative direct and net effect (three to four percentage points) on safe refrigeration among people between the ages of 30 and 60years. Our findings have important policy implications for food policy managers. Past consumer food-safety information programs have shown modest effects on changing food-handling practices. Our results suggest two paths in which information campaigns could be effective in reducing unsafe food preparation behaviors. One way is to heighten people's behavior-specific risk perceptions with respect to the food supply as this increases people's perceived risk from not performing proper food preparation. For instance, we see major behavior changes observed after media accounts of food-borne illnesses and recalls, primarily driven by lowered perceptions of the safety of the food supply. In addition, "appeal to fear" campaigns have had some success in reducing smoking, and drunk driving. The other way to improve food-safety behavior is to design targeted communication strategies to directly increase people's perceptions of the risk associated with their current food-handling practices. The results suggest increasing the perceived risk of current poor food handling may lead to increased diligence in safer food handling. That is, to improve food handling may require people to first decrease their optimism of their current food-handling practices. This is because decreasing the optimism bias would lead people to seek and be open to new information to improve their food-handling practices. Indeed, studies indicate appeals to fear messaging (where the appeal highlights current practices are ineffective) are most successful if they include a message providing a new effective practice which is easily implemented. That the gap between actual and perceived risks is reduced implies an increase in social welfare due to reduced foodborne illness. Further, our analysis helps identify which individuals are best targeted for these interventions based on demographics that are observable to regulators. In fact, the primary factor driving the behavioral differences appear to be due to optimism bias. Of course, being in one of these demographic groups does not provide much insight into what psychological antecedents should be targeted (a limitation of our data). However, one can turn towards the rich social psychology literature, which focuses effort on identifying the antecedents of safe food consumption and handling behaviors, for insight. While many studies do not link antecedents to demographic characteristics, a small subset either explicitly incorporate demographics into their models or examine differences in the antecedents across demographic groups. We encourage future researchers examining food-safety behaviors to link their study of antecedents to demographic variables, as information programs are more likely to be successful if they target their antecedent-based messages to the correct demographic (an observable variable in population-level research studies and information programs). In the food-safety realm, social media is not yet a substitute for traditional media; however, the rise in social media personalization could foster a future where food-safety messages could be tailored to individuals based on previous website interactions. Indeed, such personalization could provide policymakers the opportunities to use psychometric results to change food-safety behaviors via targeted messaging. Given the lack of regulatory options on behavior in this setting, information campaigns targeting behavior-specific risk perceptions may provide an effective tool to address issues such as consumers' over-confidence in their current food-handling behaviors. Although our data do not allow us to identify whether information programs should focus on increasing people's general food-risk perceptions or increasing people's perceptions of the risks on their current food-handling practices, we expect it would be politically expedient to focus on the latter. Future research should examine the relative importance of these roles in improving food-handling behavior.
Publications
- Type:
Journal Articles
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2020
Citation:
Keith S. Evans, Mario F. Teisl, Amy M. Lando and Sherry T. Liu. 2020. Risk perceptions and food handling practices in the home. Food Policy 95: p. 101939
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Progress 10/01/18 to 09/30/19
Outputs
Target Audience:Maine CDC, Agricultural Council of Maine (AGCOM (provides a forum for all statewide agricultural organizations to meet and discuss how to move Maine food and farming forward)) Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?
Nothing Reported
How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?
Nothing Reported
What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?
Nothing Reported
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
Goals 1,2 and 3 will be accomplished as we analyse the aquaculture survey responses. Goal 4 will be accomplished with a new paper aimed at linking health-related information (fish related mercury risks and omega-3 benefits) to changes in fish consumption; analysis is complete and we are currently drafting the paper. Goal 5 will be accomplished in the near future as we obtained a $3 million grant from NSF which focuses on identifying environmental change and its impact on human health
Publications
- Type:
Journal Articles
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2019
Citation:
Teresa R. Johnson, Kate Beard, Damian Brady, Carrie J. Byron, Caitlin Cleaver, Kevin Duffy, Nicholas Keeney, Melissa Kimble, Molly Miller, Shane Moeykens, Mario Teisl, G. Peter van Walsum, Jing Yuan. 2019. A Social-Ecological Systems Framework for Marine Aquaculture Research Sustainability 11(9):2522-2542, doi:10.3390/su11092522
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