FØJO III > Categorisations of organic products

Categorisations of organic products

Objectives

To explore the extent to which consumers tend to categorise organic food products in the contexts of everyday shopping and meal preparation as (a) constituting a single integrated category (hereafter referred to as the ‘integral’ mode), or as (b) exhibiting one or more product advantages, which are shared by some conventional variants of the same products (hereafter referred to as the ‘diffuse’ mode), and to identify the criteria that appear to be operative in each case.
To identify the demographic and social characteristics of consumers who categorise organic products in (a) integral or (b) diffuse modes respectively, and relationships between these characteristics and attitudes towards food products, producers and production methods.
To investigate the relationship between willingness to pay a premium price for organic food products and criteria employed in categorising and ranking food products.
To investigate relationships between consumer characteristics, modes of categorisation with respect to organic products, willingness to pay a premium price and actual selections of organic products as exhibited in patterns of purchase.

Description of work

This work package is designed with a view to developing links between the theory of categorisation as developed in cognitive sociology with the theory of utility structure as developed in consumer economics and applied to analysis of consumer demand for organic foods in the FØJOII project III.1. At an empirical level, it will employ a qualitative method of sociological investigation by means of focus groups as its point of departure, in order to delineate the criteria employed in distinct modes of categorisation, referred to as ‘integral’ and ‘diffuse’, respectively. The results of this investigation will then be exploited in the development of a questionnaire and a choice experiment. The questionnaire will be administered to a representative sample of households comprising the GfK panel of Danish households, and will thus facilitate generalisation of the initial results to a representative population as well as yielding further supplementary data. Survey data will be combined with existing panel data regarding purchases of organic and conventional food products. Analysis of these data sets will regard relationships between trends identified in the survey data and actual patterns of purchases made by households. The choice experiment, also based on the use of quantitative methods, will determine the extent to which willingness to pay a premium price for organic food products is dependent upon the criteria employed in consumers’ mode of categorising organic products.