Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Clusters
Kruskal Wallis Test
Production
Systems
Young
professionals
Older
technician
Oldest-
unemployed
Chi-Square
Asymp. Sig
Conventional
0.170
0.188
0.211
1.287
0.526
Sustainable
0.274
0.284
0.253
2.264
0.322
Organic
0.556
0.528
0.536
1.242
0.537
Table 4.
Consumer attitudes toward food production systems for each segment
Clusters
Kruskal Wallis Test
Criteria
Young
professionals
Older
technician
Oldest-
unemployed
Chi-Square Asymp. Sig
Environmental Concerns
0.142
0.158
0.132
1.783
0.410
Food Safety
0.270
0.281
0.309
4.569
0.102
Food Quality
0.199
0.222
0.208
2.493
0.288
Wellness
0.292
0.261
0.277
1.135
0.567
Community Development Concerns
0.097
0.078
0.073
5.273
0.072
Table 5.
Consumer attitudes toward the criteria generated by production systems for each segment
Figure 4 shows the consumers' perceptual map derived from multidimensional scaling. The
map illustrates the pattern of proximities for food production systems and the criteria
consumers used to assign preference ratings. Kuskal's stress value was used to measure
goodness-of-fit. The stress value is a number on a scale from 0 (perfect fit) to 100 (the map
captures nothing about the data). In general, researchers are looking for a stress value less than
20 [38]. In the MDS results, Kruskal's stress value is 10 for this two dimensional model and
R2=0.97. Similar to factor analysis, there is a measure of difficulty in interpreting the conceptual
mapping of consumers' perception. To overcome this difficulty, researchers rely on their
knowledge of the subject, existing theory and plausible rationale along with the weights
associated with the stimulus coordinates to make good sense of the derived stimulus config‐
uration [39]. The results indicate that consumers view organic production systems as quite
dissimilar to the other production systems. Additionally, organic production is perceived as
being associated with food safety and wellness, but not with environmental and community
development benefits. On the other hand, consumers perceive a sustainable system of
production to be associated with environmental and community development and food
quality. Consumers see conventional as being dissimilar to organic and sustainable production
systems and not associated with environment, community development, food quality, food
safety and wellness. Consequently, the y axis is labeled as environmental /community
development and the x axis as conventional production system. This means that moving from
