Systems of Attitudes Towards Production in the Pork Industry: A Cross-National Study

Appetite, Vol. 59, pp. 885–897, 2012

Posted: 24 Nov 2012

See all articles by Bjarne Taulo Soerensen

Bjarne Taulo Soerensen

Aarhus University

Marcia Dutra de Barcellos

Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS/PPGA)

Nina Veflen Olsen

Independent

Wim Verbeke

Ghent University - Department of Agricultural Economics

Joachim Scholderer

Arhus University; University of Zurich

Date Written: 2012

Abstract

Existing research on public attitudes towards agricultural production systems is largely descriptive, abstracting from the processes through which members of the general public generate their evaluations of such systems. The present paper adopts a systems perspective on such evaluations, understanding them as embedded into a wider attitude system that consists of attitudes towards objects of different abstraction levels, ranging from personal value orientations over general socio-political attitudes to evaluations of specific characteristics of agricultural production systems. It is assumed that evaluative affect propagates through the system in such a way that the system becomes evaluatively consistent and operates as a schema for the generation of evaluative judgments. In the empirical part of the paper, the causal structure of an attitude system from which people derive their evaluations of pork production systems was modelled. The analysis was based on data from a cross-national survey involving 1931 participants from Belgium, Denmark, Germany and Poland. The survey questionnaire contained measures of personal value orientations and attitudes towards environment and nature, industrial food production, food and the environment, technological progress, animal welfare, local employment and local economy. In addition, the survey included a conjoint task by which participants’ evaluations of the importance of production system attributes were measured. The data were analysed by means of causal search algorithms and structural equation models. The results suggest that evaluative judgments of the importance of pork production system attributes are generated in a schematic manner, driven by personal value orientations. The effect of personal value orientations was strong and largely unmediated by attitudes of an intermediate level of generality, suggesting that the dependent variables in the particular attitude system that was modelled here can be understood as value judgments in a literal sense.

Keywords: Attitudes, Values, Conjoint analysis, Causal search algorithms, Structural equation modelling

Suggested Citation

Soerensen, Bjarne Taulo and de Barcellos, Marcia Dutra and Olsen, Nina Veflen and Verbeke, Wim and Scholderer, Joachim, Systems of Attitudes Towards Production in the Pork Industry: A Cross-National Study (2012). Appetite, Vol. 59, pp. 885–897, 2012, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2179810

Bjarne Taulo Soerensen (Contact Author)

Aarhus University ( email )

Nordre Ringgade 1
Aarhus, DK-8000
Denmark

Marcia Dutra De Barcellos

Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS/PPGA) ( email )

Rua Washington Luiz, 855. Centro
Porto Alegre - RS, 90010-460
Brazil

Nina Veflen Olsen

Independent ( email )

Wim Verbeke

Ghent University - Department of Agricultural Economics ( email )

Coupure Links 653
Ghent, 9000
Belgium

Joachim Scholderer

Arhus University ( email )

Department of Economics and Business Economics
Fuglesangs Allé 4
Århus V, 8210
Denmark
+45 871 65019 (Phone)

HOME PAGE: http://person.au.dk/js@econ.au.dk

University of Zurich ( email )

CCRS
Zähringerstrasse 24
Zurich, 8001
Switzerland
+41 44 634 40 61 (Phone)

HOME PAGE: http://www.ccrs.uzh.ch

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