Trust in Food

Trust is important in the food sector. This is primarily because households entrust some of the tasks related to food preparation to food processors. The public is concerned about pesticides, food additives, preservatives, and processed foods that may harbor unwanted chemicals or additives. After numerous food scandals, consumers expect food processing industries and retailers to take responsibility for food safety. Meanwhile, the food industry focuses on profit growth and costs reduction to achieve higher production efficiency and competitiveness. It means that they introduce innovations, such as new production methods, processing techniques, and additives. Consumers have to delegate the responsibility for ensuring food safety to food producers, retailers, and regulatory authorities who ensure that the foods are safe, healthy, and pose no risks. For consumers, trusting these actors can reduce feelings of uncertainty. It is helpful for companies to be responsible for their activities through transparency and traceability. In turn, the food industry tries to gain consumers’ trust by providing objective information, such as ranked brands or labels on food packages

What are they thinking? Consumer attitudes to meat production in Australia

Meat production has come under increasing scrutiny from consumers and citizens who feel that certain practices are unethical and negatively affect farm-animal welfare. Animal welfare can be viewed as both a scientific and social concept, and purchasing products with animal welfare claims can be considered an act of ‘ethical consumption’. The present paper reviews research that examines consumer attitudes to animal welfare and highlights tensions between consumer and citizen attitudes and behaviours, and assumptions that are made within these studies. We present our own research into motivations to purchase free-range eggs as an example of research that attempts to unpack these assumptions, in particular, that such purchases are made out of concern for animal welfare. We present a further example of our own research that attempts to identify how attitudes to meat production are socially constructed. We conclude with recommended strategies to engage the broader community in discussions about animal production, so as to improve industry–community communication about farm-animal welfare in meat-production industries.H. J. Bray, E. A. Buddle and R. A. Anken

What are we eating? Consumer information requirement within a workplace canteen

The workplace is a captive environment where the overall contribution of the meal served could be an important element of the overall diet. Despite growing demand little information is available to aid healthy dish selection. This study identifies information valued by consumers in the UK, Greece, Denmark and France using best-worst scaling. Value for Money, Nutrition and Naturalness are key elements of information that consumers require to be able to make a conscious decision about dish selection in all four countries. Latent class analysis shows that consumers align to one of five cluster groups, i.e., Value Driven, Conventionalists, Socially Responsible, Health Conscious and Locavores. Understanding key information needs can allow food operators to align their service with consumer preferences across different market segments

Applying the Five-Factor Model to Game Design

What makes us like or dislike certain games? Is there relation between our tastes in games and our personalities and can it be measured? This dissertation examines gamer personalities and game attributes with the help of the Five-Factor Model, also called The Big Five. It treats an experiment on how to apply the Five-Factor Model to games and their players and what it may be used for. By interviewing gamers, recording their favored and unfavored games, letting the gamers take a Big Five personality test and then juxtapose their personalities with their games' attributes, those questions may be answered

Hur maten blev en risk : Medicinens bidrag till regleringen av det svenska ätandet

The aim of this dissertation is to historically study the medical and political regulation of swedish eating, with a special focus on the contribution of medicine to such a regulation. In a first theoretical part the study is placed within a "sociology of food" tradition. It is argued that in order to understand modern eating a historical approach needs to be taken. It is also argued that the role of medicine and politics in shaping modern eating is often overlooked in sociology. For this purpose a Foucaultian method of discourse analysis is choosen to look at how food and eating has been problematised in medical and political documents over the last two centuries and what strategies, techniques and apparatuses have been developed to solve these problems. The empirical part consists of three interrelated studies. In the first study three qualitatively different historical medico/political approaches to food and eating are identified: an economising approach, a "hygienic nourishment" approach and finally a risk-management approach. It is argued that nutritional science has been been closely involved in setting the agenda for as well as legitimising a number of political concerns for more than a century. The second empirical study looks closer at how medicine has been involved in the regulation of eating at a micro-level. This is done through a study of how overeating/obesity has been problematised within medicine and how disciplinary background effects the way in which overeating is constructed as well as the techniques developed to treat it. Finally, the third study looks closer at how risk became a central category in the medical discourse. This is done by looking closer at the hypothesis that dietary fat was an important risk factor behind atherosclerotic heart-disease and the process it had to go through in order to reach medical concensus or near-concensus. Finally it is argued that we have to understand the modern concern with food risks not as a reaction to an essential state of the modern world but as a discursive effect to a large extent generated by the medical discouse around food

Applying the Five-Factor Model to Game Design

What makes us like or dislike certain games? Is there relation between our tastes in games and our personalities and can it be measured? This dissertation examines gamer personalities and game attributes with the help of the Five-Factor Model, also called The Big Five. It treats an experiment on how to apply the Five-Factor Model to games and their players and what it may be used for. By interviewing gamers, recording their favored and unfavored games, letting the gamers take a Big Five personality test and then juxtapose their personalities with their games' attributes, those questions may be answered

Förändrade intimitetsformer bland äldre i det senmoderna samhället

Changing forms of intimacy among older people in late modern society The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to a neglected reality in Swedish social research: New romantic relationships in later life. Our theoretical points of departure are the transformation of intimacy and the transition from a culture of marriage to a culture of divorce. We ask if the transformation of intimacy has reached later life and investigate late life divorce, attitudes to and choice of union form in late life heterosexual relationships, relationship history and the importance of a relationship for life satisfaction. The results, which are based both on demographic data and a survey to 60–90 year old Swedes (n=1225), show that changing relationship patterns in late modern Sweden have reached older people. In romantic relationships initiated in later life LAT is the preferred union form, followed by cohabitation, while marriage is a rare choice. In some respects this makes older people an avant-garde in the investigation of alternative union forms. The results also show the importance of romantic relationships for life satisfaction in later life – independent of union form. Finally we criticize Swedish census data, which is based on civil status, for giving a somewhat distorted image of older people’s family and romantic lives.    Sociologisk Forsknings digitala arkiv</p