Investigation of Consumer Trends about Imported Foods among University Students

Abstract

  The consumer trends about the imported foods were investigated by a questionnaire survey involving 108 men and 200 women students. The results were as follows.
  1) The desire purchase to imported foods (vegetables, fruits and fishes) were answered as “purchase sometimes” by the men and women, while the image of the price of the imported foods was evaluated by a low price, and those of quality, safety, and taste also had a low evaluation below “usually”.
  On the other hand, when converting the category answers in the investigation to the amounts, the results showed that the correlations between the desire purchase to the three kinds of foods were significant mutually, and those between the four images to the foods were also similar. Based on the component analysis for the desire purchase or for the images, the relation of the multi-items was obviously shown with the figure.
  2) Concerning the safety of the imported foods, the four cases of pesticide residue, food additives, transgenic crop plants and encephalopathy were examined. In these four cases, for the “A” items concerning the knowledge of safety, etc., men and women who were recognizing safety accounted for 50% or more. In the “B” items concerning the consideration of safety, there were many people who had the feelings of worry with ratios from 60 to 95%, and the women were more significant than the men in three cases.
  With the amount of conversion as well as the above analyses, the “A” items and the “B” items in the four cases showed significant mutual positive correlations. In addition, from the tree diagram by the cluster analysis of the eight “A” and “B” items, the relations under consideration among those items were shown visually.
  3) Concerning the future of the imported foods, from the total result of the seven presented answers, (a-g), the answers of a and e with “want to import the foods if the price was lower, or the imported foods were unquestionable”, and the answers of c and d with “do not want to import the foods as much as possible for safety, or domestic producers of the foods”, were selected by many of the students. It was shown that there was a significant difference between the men and women regarding the answers in the survey (p<0. 01).