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Food Safety Risk Information-Seeking Intention of WeChat Users in China

Consumers’ food safety risk information-seeking behavior plays a vital role in improving their food quality and safety awareness and preventing food safety risks. Based on the Risk Information Seeking and Processing Model (RISP), this paper empirically analyzes the food safety risk information-seeki...

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Autores principales: Yang, Zhaohui, Paudel, Krishna P., Wen, Xiaowei, Sun, Sangluo, Wang, Yong
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7177356/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32244472
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17072376
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author Yang, Zhaohui
Paudel, Krishna P.
Wen, Xiaowei
Sun, Sangluo
Wang, Yong
author_facet Yang, Zhaohui
Paudel, Krishna P.
Wen, Xiaowei
Sun, Sangluo
Wang, Yong
author_sort Yang, Zhaohui
collection PubMed
description Consumers’ food safety risk information-seeking behavior plays a vital role in improving their food quality and safety awareness and preventing food safety risks. Based on the Risk Information Seeking and Processing Model (RISP), this paper empirically analyzes the food safety risk information-seeking intention of consumers in WeChat and influencing factors under the impact of food safety incidents. We use data from 774 WeChat users and apply the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach. We also conduct multigroup analysis with demographic characteristics as moderating variables. The results demonstrated that: (1) Risk perception (p ≤ 0.01) has direct significant positive effects on consumers’ intention to seek food safety information. Besides, higher risk perception (p ≤ 0.01) regarding food safety risks will make people feel more anxious and threatened, and then expand the gap between the information they need and the relevant knowledge they actually have (p ≤ 0.1), which will further stimulate them to seek more information (p ≤ 0.05). (2) Informational subjective norms (p ≤ 0.01) can not only directly affect consumers’ information-seeking about food safety, but also indirectly affect consumers’ intention through information insufficiency (p ≤ 0.01). (3) The more consumers trust the relevant channels (p ≤ 0.01), the stronger their intention to search for food safety risk information. Moreover, the multiple-group analysis also shows that the effects of consumers’ gender, age, educational background, and average monthly earnings are different among different groups. Furthermore, implications are put forward for food safety risk communication efforts in China.
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spelling pubmed-71773562020-04-28 Food Safety Risk Information-Seeking Intention of WeChat Users in China Yang, Zhaohui Paudel, Krishna P. Wen, Xiaowei Sun, Sangluo Wang, Yong Int J Environ Res Public Health Article Consumers’ food safety risk information-seeking behavior plays a vital role in improving their food quality and safety awareness and preventing food safety risks. Based on the Risk Information Seeking and Processing Model (RISP), this paper empirically analyzes the food safety risk information-seeking intention of consumers in WeChat and influencing factors under the impact of food safety incidents. We use data from 774 WeChat users and apply the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach. We also conduct multigroup analysis with demographic characteristics as moderating variables. The results demonstrated that: (1) Risk perception (p ≤ 0.01) has direct significant positive effects on consumers’ intention to seek food safety information. Besides, higher risk perception (p ≤ 0.01) regarding food safety risks will make people feel more anxious and threatened, and then expand the gap between the information they need and the relevant knowledge they actually have (p ≤ 0.1), which will further stimulate them to seek more information (p ≤ 0.05). (2) Informational subjective norms (p ≤ 0.01) can not only directly affect consumers’ information-seeking about food safety, but also indirectly affect consumers’ intention through information insufficiency (p ≤ 0.01). (3) The more consumers trust the relevant channels (p ≤ 0.01), the stronger their intention to search for food safety risk information. Moreover, the multiple-group analysis also shows that the effects of consumers’ gender, age, educational background, and average monthly earnings are different among different groups. Furthermore, implications are put forward for food safety risk communication efforts in China. MDPI 2020-03-31 2020-04 /pmc/articles/PMC7177356/ /pubmed/32244472 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17072376 Text en © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Yang, Zhaohui
Paudel, Krishna P.
Wen, Xiaowei
Sun, Sangluo
Wang, Yong
Food Safety Risk Information-Seeking Intention of WeChat Users in China
title Food Safety Risk Information-Seeking Intention of WeChat Users in China
title_full Food Safety Risk Information-Seeking Intention of WeChat Users in China
title_fullStr Food Safety Risk Information-Seeking Intention of WeChat Users in China
title_full_unstemmed Food Safety Risk Information-Seeking Intention of WeChat Users in China
title_short Food Safety Risk Information-Seeking Intention of WeChat Users in China
title_sort food safety risk information-seeking intention of wechat users in china
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7177356/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32244472
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17072376
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