The New Zealand Food Market: An Overview
Chapter 3 Literature Review
4.2 Survey structure
Following consultation with focus groups, the survey structure was developed. The survey comprised a range of questions including single and multi-response questions, Likert-scale questions and a choice experiment. The survey structure is illustrated in Table 4.1 which shows the survey to be an in-depth investigation of consumer preferences, attitudes and demand for food and beverage attributes, as well as where and how to purchase food products in NZ. Each survey component is explained briefly in the following paragraphs.
The survey begin with a screening question to ensure that the participants went grocery shopping at least monthly, as well as two quota-sampling questions in order to capture an appropriate spread of regions across New Zealand as well as all income brackets.
The survey was implemented online where the use of a purchased respondent panel was selected as the sampling approach. This approach is non-probabilistic/non-random sampling which was considered to be a practical way to achieve an adequate sampling frame for this study. A brief overview of this sampling approach, its advantages and disadvantages, is reported in Guenther et al. 2015.
Table 4.1. Survey structure
Component Main question Type Logic
Sampling Screen-outs • Shopping frequency Single- response
Quota • Region
• Income Credence
attributes, purchases
Attributes Quality, Price, Animal health, Animal welfare, Environmental condition, Health enhancing foods, Food safety, Social responsibility, Nutritional value, Māori culture, Country of origin
Likert-scale
Authentication Likert-scale
Factors of attributes
For: food safety, environmental condition, animal welfare, health enhancing foods, social responsibility, and Māori food and beverage products
Likert-scale
Current level Attributes Likert-scale
Product purchases Multi-
response
Product purchases Dietary habits
Choice Experiment
Information
Choice sets • Dairy generic
• Dairy: butter
• Meat: generic
• Meat: beef steak
Choice set Randomly selected;
conditional a respondent buying meat/dairy products (skipped otherwise) Debriefing
questions
• Attribute attendance
• Certainty, difficulty, understanding
• Reasons behind choices
Single and multi- response Alternative
retailers
Alternative retailers
Budget, Frequency Allocate 100
per cent, Likert-scale
Frequency: if shop…
Reasons to shop Likert-scale weekly or more
often
Reasons to not shop monthly or never
Reasons to change behaviour never
"Smart tech"
Use and potential use
Attitudes, importance Likert-scale, single and multi- response Demo-
graphics
single and multi- response
4.2.1 Credence attributes and purchases
The survey then continued with questions regarding the importance of different credence (and other) attributes in relation to consumers’ food and beverage choices. These questions closely followed the structure of the international MER survey (Guenther et al., 2015). The first set of questions explored the selected attributes (Figure 5.2) at a general level of importance. This was followed with more detailed investigation of the assessment of the importance of underpinning factors for some of these attributes, including food safety, environmental condition, animal welfare, health-enhancing foods, social responsibility, and lastly, specific to New Zealand, the role of Māori culture in relation to food and beverage products. Different authentication schemes for product claims were also investigated within this set of questions, all using a Likert-scale importance rating. This part of the questionnaire finished with yes/no questions of usual product purchases and multi-response question about dietary requirements, if any.
4.2.2 Alternative retailer, smart tech and demographic questions
The survey also presented questions regarding the use of alternative retailers and consumers’ reasons to use these, as well as their use of and attitudes regarding digital media and smart technology in relation to food and beverage information gathering and purchasing.
In the alternative retailer questions, the participants were asked first to indicate how they split their grocery budget over the different retailer types, and then how often they used each of the Supermarket, Specialty stores (e.g. bakery, butchers, greengrocers, health stores), Dairy, convenience stores, Farmers’
market, Take-away food (including deliveries), Other food delivery services (e.g. My Food Bag, Food Box), Ethnic food stores, Restaurants, and Other retailers which were designated based on the focus group discussions. From these, participants’ reasons to shop, not to shop or change their shopping behaviour (if they had never shopped at a particular retailer type) were explored for four selected retailer types only (Supermarkets, Specialty stores, Farmers’ markets and Other food delivery services)1. The following logics were used:
If a respondent selected a shopping frequency of Fortnightly, Weekly, 2-3 times a week or Daily for a particular retailer type, they were asked to indicate the reasons why they shopped at this retailer type; or
If a respondent selected a shopping frequency of Never or Less than once a month for a particular retailer type, they were asked to indicate the reasons why they chose not to shop to shop at this retailer type; as well as
If a respondent selected a shopping frequency of Never for a particular retailer type, they were also asked to indicate under what circumstances they would then choose shop at this retailer type.
The questions about participants’ use of and attitudes towards digital media and smart technology were consistent with the MER project (Driver et al. 2015) to allow for a straightforward comparison. The survey finished with standard demographic questions. The full questionnaire can be found in Appendix 1.
1 This question was limited to some retailers and frequencies only in order to keep the survey length manageable.