Beliefs about food quality attributes, food-related goals and satisfaction with food-related life among the elderly in China: A means-end approach

Abstract

Life satisfaction is a psychological state of an individual, however, a psychological perspective on how life satisfaction is based on cognitive inference-making has been largely neglected in the extant literature on elderly’s life satisfaction. This paper fills the gap by focusing on the psychological determinants of Chinese elderly’s satisfaction with the food domain of life, i.e. satisfaction with food-related life. Data were collected by personal interviews conducted in Beijing with 452 participants above 60 years old from March to May 2018. Based on means-end theory and the “bottom-up” approach to the concept of life satisfaction, this study confirms the hierarchical relationships between beliefs about food safety, taste, naturalness and freshness, the food-related goals of health seeking, enjoyment seeking and variety seeking, satisfaction with food-related life, and overall life satisfaction among Chinese elderly. All the three food-related goals positively affected Chinese elderly’s satisfaction with food-related life with the goal of enjoyment seeking as the strongest predictor. Positive belief about food freshness was related to the importance of all the three goals. Food naturalness belief was negatively related to the goals of health seeking and enjoyment seeking, while belief about food safety did not have any significant impact on either of the two goals. The food taste belief did not significantly affect the goal of enjoyment seeking but affected the goal of variety seeking. Implications for how to improve Chinese elderly’s satisfaction with food-related life and for future research were provided.