Company News
Company News
To comply with the proposed objectives, a survey was carried out in
Porto Alegre's metropolitan area in Brazil with undergraduate students
at two universities. At the same time, the survey was also conducted in
Cirencester with undergraduate and postgraduate students from one
university in the UK. The survey comprised 28 questions divided in three
sections. The first section was about the respondent's attitudes
towards the purchase of new, different and innovative foods throughout
the application of the 6-item Domain Specific Innovativeness Scale [DSI]
developed by Goldsmith and Hofacker (1991). The five-point Likert scale
items were anchored with (1) 'strongly disagree' and (5) 'strongly
agree', with (3) corresponding to the neutral position 'neither agree
nor disagree'. In addition, participants could choose option (9) 'I
don't know' if they were unsure about the meaning of the
question or if their influence in the shopping behaviour of food
innovations was null. In this case, answers would be treated as missing
values. The questions were coded so that a high score reflected higher
levels of innovativeness. The theoretical range of scores for each of
the measures was from 6 to 30, i.e., the sum response to these six items
provides a domain-specific Phenyl Xylyl Ethane innovativeness
score that ranges from minimum 6 to maximum 30. Finally, following
studies from Goldsmith and Hofacker (1991), Goldsmith, Freiden and
Eastman (1995) and others (Hynes & Lo, 2006; Phau & Lo, 2004)
subgroups of innovators and adopters (non-innovators) were identified
within each sample. The second section attempted to measure food
neophobia with Pliner and Hobden's (1992) Food Neophobia Scale [FNS].
The 5-point Likert scale items were also anchored with (1) 'totally
disagree' and (5) 'totally agree', with (3) corresponding to the neutral
position 'neither agree nor disagree'. Option (9) Phenyl Ethyl Phenyl Ethane corresponded
to 'I don't know' and answers within this category were treated as
missing values. The individual scores for neophobia were obtained by
summing the 10-item scores, as described by the authors. Respondents
were then categorized into subgroups of neophobics and non-neophobics.
Finally, the third section comprised of some demographic profiling
questions as well as questions measuring the level of exposure to new
technology, gadgets and specific novel foods. In Brazil, 279 valid
questionnaires were obtained. Consumers were surveyed using face-to-face
interviews through the self-administered survey technique. 101 valid
questionnaires were obtained with the same technique from consumers
surveyed in the UK. The data collected was subjected to
statistic-testing such as T-test and Chi-square analysis to assess the
significance between different groups of respondents. Internal
consistency of DSI and the FNS components was measured by Cronbach's
alpha.