Consumer Awareness On Food Quality And Safety Risk And Information Search Behavior Research

In recent years, the demand for safety food has increased rapidly in China as well as the food poisoning accidents occurred annually. The government has enhanced the food safety control system and many academic researches also studied food safety from various perspectives. This paper focus on consumer's risk perception and information search behavior during fresh vegetables purchase, the empirical study and theoretic analyses have been made to get implications for relative issues.The thesis is made up of 5 sections. The first section describes the background and sense of this study, and then the review of existing literatures at home and abroad and the methodology of the study are introduced. The second section reviews literatures of risk perception theory and information search behavior theory. The third section focused on the content and transformation of food quality safety information regulation both in china and in the improved country that mainly contains U.S.A, European Union & Japan. Section four is the most important one, which includes chapter five and six. At the beginning of this section, an information search model is built based on the literature review mentioned in chapter four, and then the methodology of the study and questionnaire design are introduced. Chapter six is the part of empirical study. Based on the questionnaire survey of 400 fresh vegetables purchasers in Zhejiang, a descriptive statistics is used to analyze the general situation of consumer's risk perception and information search behavior and a binary logistic regression is employed to validate hypotheses. The results indicate that the fresh vegetable purchaser have high risk perception and need more risk information about food safety, and there are distinct differences in different age and gender variables. Generally, consumers take some actions in order to reduce food risk and evaluate the safety of food in the order of "freshness", "credit" and "safety logo". The study also shows that consumers get more food safety information from newspapers and televisions, and they trust the information from government than that from the mass media. Product characteristics, demographic characteristics, dietetic status and purchase experiences have been approved to affect consumer's information search behavior distinctly. In section five, the management implications are forwarded to facilitate the lever of food safety information control system in China.