Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Due to the nature, scope, and signifi cance of this contamination incident, and the
potential lessons that might be learned from it, the Food Policy Institute (FPI) of the
New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station at Rutgers, the State University of New
Jersey undertook an analysis of the information that key actors attempted to deliver
as events unfolded; the media coverage of those messages and events; and the infor-
mation that consumers received, remembered, and acted upon. This report focuses on
the third portion of this analysis; that is, what did consumers know, where did they
get that information, and what did they do (and continue to do) in response to the
advisories issued by the FDA warning them not to eat fresh spinach?
Methods
Sample
To explore these questions, a nationally representative sample of 1,200 Ameri-
cans from all 50 states was interviewed by telephone during November 8-29,
2006. Computer Assisted Telephone Interviews (CATI) were conducted with nonin-
stitutionalized adults aged 18 or over. Proportional random digit dialing was used to
select survey participant households, and the CATI system was programmed to
provide prompts to select the appropriate proportions of male and female participants.
Working nonbusiness numbers were called a minimum of 12 times distributed over
days of the week and time of day in attempts to obtain interviews. The cooperation
rate was 48%, with a resulting sampling error of
2.8%. The resulting data were
weighted by gender, age, race, ethnicity, and education to approximate U.S. Census
fi gures.
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Survey Instrument
While the initial response of the FDA was to issue an “alert” to consumers advising
them not to eat fresh spinach, for convenience in referring to the period of time and
the events associated with the contamination of fresh spinach with
E. coli
O157:H7
and the subsequent foodborne illness outbreak, they used the term “spinach recall” in
the survey instrument, and we adopted the same convention for this chapter. This
terminology is consistent with that used in much of the media coverage that occurred
during the period of interest. Before fi elding the survey, a search of the coverage of
nine newspapers between September 15 and September 22, 2006, revealed that the
word “ recall ” was used 107 times in conjunction with “ spinach, ” while “ advisory ”
was only used 30 times (Cuite 2008). As the results below suggest, the term “recall”
was familiar to most of our respondents.
To help prevent response biases, the fl ow of the questionnaire and specifi c ques-
tions were tailored depending on whether respondents had heard about the spinach
recall. For example, respondents who had heard about the spinach recall were asked.
“Did you eat spinach before the recall?” and consumers who were unaware of the
recall were simply asked, “Do you eat spinach?” Similarly, some questions that
referred specifi cally to knowledge or behaviors during the recall were not asked of
respondents who had not heard of the recall or who did not eat spinach before the
recall.
