Abstract
Consumers play an important role as one of the main actors in food safety social co-governance. To create a pattern of food safety social co-governance, the active and effective participation of consumers is critical. To encourage consumers to participate in food safety social co-governance voluntarily and positively, we attempted to develop and preliminarily validate a multidimensional questionnaire on consumer psychological capital that could be used to measure the degree of consumer participation in food safety social co-governance. The aim of the initial sample (N = 170) and test sample 2 (N = 204) was to investigate the factor structure of a preliminary measure of consumer psychological capital. A 4-factor model with 23 items explained 61.05% of the total variance in item scores. The aim of test sample 3 (N = 30) was to measure the retest reliability. Test sample 4 (N = 1,076) was randomly allocated to the modeling sample (N = 538) and validation sample (N = 538) to verify questionnaire reliability and validity. Convergent validity, discriminant validity, and the internal inconsistency coefficients of the questionnaire were assessed in the modeling sample. While processing CFA, we deleted 9 items with small standardized factor loadings. The remaining 14 items in the final revised 4-factor model included self-efficacy, resilience, hope, and optimism. The fit indices of the revised four-factor model and second-order factor model in the modeling sample revealed an acceptable model fit. The convergent validity and discriminant validity of the revised model were good and acceptable, respectively. A cross-validation procedure confirmed the appropriateness of the revised four-factor model and second-order factor model in the validation sample. The cross-validation results confirmed that the fit indices of the revised four-factor model fitted the data well and the second-order factor model in the validation sample reached acceptable values. We concluded that the questionnaire developed in this study had good reliability and stable and acceptable construct validity. It could provide a theoretical basis for measuring psychological capital in food safety co-governance.
Highlights
Food safety is a topic of central interest to almost all members of society as it is pertinent to health
To improve the efficiency of food safety governance, reduce governance costs, and reduce or even eliminate food safety risks (Coglianese and Lazer, 2003; Martinez et al, 2007), in June 2013, the government introduced the concept of social co-governance for food safety, which consists of five parts: government supervision, enterprise autonomy, social cooperation, public participation, and legal protection (Wu et al, 2018)
The purpose of this article is to explore how to improve consumer eagerness to participate in food safety co-governance from a non-policy perspective, so that consumers can voluntarily play the supervisory role in food safety social co-governance
Summary
Food safety is a topic of central interest to almost all members of society as it is pertinent to health. Excessive government intervention suppressed the market’s regulatory role, and safety incidents still occur frequently (Wang et al, 2018; Yi et al, 2019). In this circumstance, more effective approaches to food safety governance must be explored. In the food safety social co-governance process, diverse actors cooperate and work together to regulate food safety at a lower cost by the combined and synergetic use of multiple instruments, such as government regulation, market incentives, technical regulation, social supervision, and information dissemination under the framework of laws and regulations, to ensure a higher level of food safety and achieve maximum social welfare (Martinez et al, 2007; Wu et al, 2018)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
