フードシステムにおける生野菜の心理的安全性評価

構造方程式モデリングによる分析

抄録

Firstly, this article aimed at examining the psychological process in the evaluation of food safety. We hypothesized that peoples' subjective evaluation of food safety consists of three psychological aspects: the perceived safety of treatment, the perceived safety of food-itself, and the affective response. The second aim of the article was to show both the difference and commonality in the psychological process among the peoples in subgroups in the food system of fresh vegetables: famers, wholesalers, processors, retailers, and consumers. Thus, we employed 10 independent variables including compliance, informational openness, and groundless perception of safety, which were hypothesized to influence the three aspects of the evaluation. Using the data on a sample of 1, 201 people regarding their opinion of fresh vegetables, path analyses by Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) revealed that our model was valid and that people in each subgroup had both the common processes and the different ones. The perceived safety of treatment had the largest effect on the evaluation on safety of fresh vegetable in all subgroups. Compliance and groundless perception of safety were also effective in all subgroups.However, the complexity of the process differed within the subgroups; the consumers had the simplest process and the retailers had the most complex one. These phenomena were discussed for their implications on risk management and risk communication.