Abstract
This study aimed to explore the effect of scientific literacy on the tendency towards purchase avoidance of foods made in Fukushima due to harmful rumours associated with the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident. A web survey was sent to 880 Japanese monitors to determine their attitudes towards the damage caused by untrue rumours, food risks, and media literacy, and to verify whether respondents’ knowledge about radioactive material reduced their intention to purchase products made in Fukushima Prefecture. A factor analysis of all the items of the two literacy scales (i.e. food and media) and food faddism scales revealed three factors: food risk literacy, media literacy, and health care. Multiple regression analysis to investigate the effect of each factor on the intention to purchase, controlling for some demographic variables, revealed that food risk literacy and media literacy promoted purchase avoidance, while knowledge of radioactive material reduced purchase avoidance of Fukushima products.
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Data availability
The data that support the findings of this study are openly available at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/2PR5D
Notes
The information of MACROMILL’s QA of monitors was retrieved from https://www.macromill.com/advantage/monitor_policy.html
When our pilot study started in 2015, Miura et al.’s (2016) scale was unpublished. Thus, we cannot use the same items. In 2017, we added to our questionnaire only the knowledge questions related to radiation from Miura et al., and the other scales from the pilot were retained. The limitation of space did not allow us to describe the results of the 2015 research. The results of the data revealed that factor analysis and multiple regression analysis were consistent with the results of this study that the attitudes aspect if food literacy and media literacy enhanced restrained buying (Nakanishi et al. 2016). The responsibility attribution of harmful rumour scale and a part of food faddism scale, which were not directly relevant to our purpose, were excluded from the data used in this research.
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Acknowledgements
We sincerely thank Ai Izumi (Kyushu University) for analysis of a part of the data.
Funding
This study was supported by funding from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research, 25245064, 16H03728) for the first and third authors.
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All procedures used in this study were approved by the Ethics Committee of Hiroshima Shudo University.
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Nakanishi, D., Yokota, K. & Igawa, J. Can scientific literacy reduce purchase avoidance of Fukushima products?. Environ Syst Decis 43, 242–250 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10669-022-09883-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10669-022-09883-x