A Study of Attractive Factors for Organic Foods from Low and High Involvement Groups

Abstract

The industrial revolution and green revolution in the nineteenth century not only caused to environment problems but also influenced human health and even damaged the structure of society and economy as a whole These complex issues forced people to rethink human civilization and to become more concerned about their living environment For these reasons it can be seen that the focus of public attention have gradually tended to move toward issues related to nature sustainable development food safety and so on Among them the “organic industry” has become a highly anticipated future trend Therefore the aim of this study is to determine what factors cause organic foods to be attractive to both low and high involvement groups through operating the Evaluation Grid Method designed by Miryoku Engineering First the author interviewed six low involvement participants and eight participants who are highly involved in the organic industry After simplifying through the use of the KJ method and organizing the data the author extracted the top five abstract feelings evoked by organic foods mentioned by the low and high involvement participants as follows: “healthy ” “secure ” “trusting ” “comfortable ” and “supportive” feelings from the low involvement participants As for the high involvement participants the top five mentioned abstract feelings are “heathy ” “secure ” “rewarded ” “safe ” and “valuable ” Subsequently the author designed questionnaires based on these items and did a statistical analysis using the Quantification Theory Type I to determine the extent of correlations between these features and the weight between items and categories according to the low and high involvement groups respectively Overall as was previously stated the study was aimed at an understanding of the attractiveness of organic foods The author also expected to provide some suggestions and rules for the organic industry to enable such business to demonstrate the true values of organic foods as perceived by consumers

Date of Award	2016 Aug 4
Original language	English
Supervisor	Chun-Heng Ho (Supervisor)