An Investigation of Plant-based Dietary Motives Among Vegetarians and Omnivores

Christopher J Hopwood,Daniel Rosenfeld,Wiebke Bleidorn,Sophia Chen

doi:10.1525/collabra.19010

Christopher J Hopwood, Daniel Rosenfeld + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.19010

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Abstract

The three most common motives for plant-based diets in western populations are health, the environment, and animal rights. This study compares the structure, endorsement rates, and personality correlates of these motives among vegetarian and omnivorous (i.e., non-vegetarian) respondents. We found evidence for configural, metric, and scalar equivalence in the measurement of these motives across vegetarians and omnivores, suggesting that vegetarian diet motives function similarly whether or not the respondent identifies as vegetarian. Vegetarians, notably, reported being more motivated by the environment and animal rights than omnivores; health motivations were similarly high across groups. Several significant effects emerged linking vegetarian motives to personality traits, with patterns of correlations between motives and traits being highly similar across vegetarians and omnivores. Overall, these findings suggest that vegetarian eating motives are similar in terms of structure and personality correlates, but differ in endorsement rates, between vegetarian and omnivorous individuals.

Highlights

The three most common motives for plant-based diets in western populations are health, the environment, and animal rights
We first evaluated the fit of the Vegetarian Eating Motives Inventory (VEMI) measurement model reported in Hopwood et al (2020), with parameter estimates freed to vary across samples
The only other substantial cross-motive profile correlations were between environmental and animal rights motives in both samples. This is not surprising, given that these scales tend to be correlated with similar patterns of criterion variables, in general (Hopwood et al, 2020). These results show that both the internal and external validities of vegetarian motives are very similar across vegetarians and omnivores

Summary

Introduction

The three most common motives for plant-based diets in western populations are health, the environment, and animal rights. Establishing measurement invariance is one way to determine whether the underlying social cognitive processes that give rise to motivations about plant-based eating operate for people who exclusively eat plant-based foods as those who do not, even if they are more compelling to vegetarians. Understanding these processes could have implications for persuasion and advocacy. Our first goal was to determine whether health, environment, and animal rights motives operate across vegetarian and omnivore participants by testing measurement invariance of the VEMI items. We hypothesized that the three-factor measurement model would be invariant across both samples across each of these levels

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