High Rumor Trusting Behavior Of Food Safety Rumor And Its Influencing Factors : A Study Based On Grounded Theory

Food safety is an important issue of people’s livelihood,which is closely related to every consumer.With the development of the food industry technology,the extension and subdivision of the modern food industry chain has brought not only a great wealth of food,but also a problem of food safety risk that are not negligible for ordinary consumers,such as additives,counterfeit and shoddy,pesticide residues,genetically modified,etc.Safety issues are characterized by their seriousness,ultra-experience,and controversy,which have caused consumers to panic and weakened their confidence in the food industry.Rumors come into being based on people’s attention to food and distrust of food industry.With the promotion of new media technologies,online food safety rumors have become a counterproductive force for the healthy development of the public opinion field,and even lead to crisis harming the normal function of food industry.Due to the harmfulness and severity of online food safety rumors,the research on food safety rumors has become an important branch in the field of risk communication research.From the perspective of rumor activity performance,people’s rumor activity includes rumor cognition activity and rumor communication activity.Previous rumor research focuses on people’s rumor communication activity.This study attempts to discuss consumers’ trust behavior of food safety rumors from the perspective of the receiver of food safety rumor.In the choice of research methods,due to the lack of relevant research on this topic,this study decided to adopt grounded theory to explore and comprehensively understand the rumor trust behavior.In terms of data collection,we select the respondents through questionnaire survey,and then conduct semi-structured interviews with the respondents;in terms of data analysis,we strictly follow the method of continuous comparison and layer by layer comparison based on the grounded theory,separate out several concepts and categories,and finally build a theoretical model of consumer rumor trust activities.Grounded results show that consumers’ rumor trust activities of food safety are a series of rumor cognitive change activities based on consumers’ perception.In this process,consumers’ rumor belief deepens into the trust of rumor information content,and accepts rumor information as a reference for consumption decisions.And individual characteristics,individual factors,environmental factors and situational factors produce and influence consumers’ rumor behavior in the process of interaction between consumers and the outside world.To sum up,in the context of the risk of food safety rumors,this study explores the process of consumers’ trust in food safety rumors and related influencing factors.The results show that consumers’ trust in food safety rumors is an activity that is affected by rationality and emotion in the process of interaction with the outside world.This paper puts forward three-level coding indexes that affect consumers’ rumor,in order to provide reference for the follow-up empirical research and rumor governance activities.