Study On Consumer’s Purchasing Intention Of Safe Food Based On TPB

The safety attribute goes first in food supply, as the food goes first in people’s daily life. Recently, the cases of food safety issue happened frequently, and continuously brought the pain to the public. Food safety is highly linked to consumer’s health and daily life, thus each related news and event could be the big concern of consumers and the focus of public media and now consumers appears to be commonly sensitive and panic. After the several cases of food safety, there is a significant behavioral change upon residents’ consumption of food, and people increasingly tend to hold the concern about the food safety. With this context, this study aims to examine the consumer’s purchasing intention of safe food.Theory of Planned Behavior(TPB) presents a cognitive model designed to study the behaviors with an incomplete control of the personal will, and were widely applied to various respects of the research on the social behavior, especially in the study of consumer’s behavioral intention it has been verified to be justifiable; Theory of risk perception is placed in the scope of Psychology, and in the existing literature it was as usual employed as the important explanatory variables in the study of consumer’s behavior regarding food safety. This paper combines the perception of risk and takes it as a new variable in TPB to construct an extended theory of planned behavior, build the model of consumer’s purchasing intention of safe food, and attempts an empirical verification based on the improved model. Finally, the analysis of the demographic characteristics which influence the consumer’s purchasing intention of safe food has been conducted. The results show:1. The questionnaire designed to examine the consumer’s purchasing intention of safe food is testified to be at a favorable level of reliability and validity, and the indicators derived from principal component factor analysis are consistent with the variables of the extended theory. The measurement scale screens out four dimensions:risk visibility, risk controllability, severity of the consequences and fear of risk; the overall scale of TPB screens out the three factors including behavioral attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control.2. The behavioral attitude, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control regarding consumer’s purchase of the safe food respectively show significantly positive impact to the behavioral beliefs, normative beliefs and control beliefs.3. The regression analysis based on the Extended TPB reveals behavioral attitude, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control positively influence the consumer’s purchasing intention of the safe food, the severity of the consequences under risk perception and risk controllability have the significantly positive impact to consumer’s purchasing intention of the safe food.4. Through testing the mediating effect of the relations between behavioral attitude to risk perception and purchasing intention, the findings suggest the influence of risk visibility to purchasing intention could be partially fulfilled by the mediating variable "behavioral attitude"; and the impact of the severity of the consequences and the fear of risk could be completely fulfilled by the mediating variable "behavioral attitude"5. At the0.01significance level, out of the demographic characteristics of consumers, gender and age respectively show the significant difference on influencing the consumer’s purchasing intention of safe food; educational level and annual income level do not.