Consumers´ Information Search Behavior on Wholesome Nutrition and their Attitudes towards Health Products; A Field Study from Eskisehir, Turkey

This survey intends to find out the attitudes of the consumers towards health products such as organic food, healthy foodstuffs and their information seeking behavior on wholesome nutrition. A survey is applied to 480 respondents selected via stratified sampling from Eskişehir, a city of Turkey with 700.000 inhabitants where 470 of the responses are found eligible... The respondents are required to answer 50 questions of which five are related to demographic characteristics of these respondents. The rest 45 are statements which are designed to reflect the behavior of these people. The study consists of five parts. The first part is an introduction where the scope and the purpose of the study are concisely stated. The second part relates to the theoretical background of the subject matter and the prior researches carried out so far. The third part deals with research methodology, basic premises and hypotheses attached to these premises. Research model and analyses take place in this section. Theoretical framework is built and a variable name is assigned to each of the question asked or proposition forwarded to the respondents of this survey. 42 statements or propositions given to the respondents are placed on a five-point Likert scale. Three questions are on an ordinal scale reflecting the most-used information sources of the respondents. The remaining five questions about demographic traits as age, gender, occupation, educational level and monthly income are placed either on a nominal or ratio scale with respect to the nature of the trait. Ten research hypotheses are formulated in this section. The fourth part mainly deals with the results of the hypothesis tests and a factor analysis is applied to the data on hand. Here exploratory factor analysis reduces 42 variables to eight basic components as: " Nutritional knowledge, nutritional labels and health claims; care for health products; consumer positive and negative attitudes toward organic foods; fast-food involvement; prior product knowledge; e-health information search; information search behavior; and system beaters". In addition non-parametric bivariate analysis in terms of Chi-Square is applied to test the hypotheses formulated in this respect. The fifth part is the conclusion where findings of this survey is listed.