The Study About Urban Consumers’ Risk Perception On Food Additives And Its Influencing Factors

The exposure of the food safety incidents in recent years makes more and more peopleconcern with the food additives. Consumers’ worry about the safety of food additives affectstheir own consuming behavior, also contributes to public discontent about domestic foodsafety. This article studies people’s risk perception on food additive substances and exploresits influencing factors. It seeks to help consumers to have a rational perspective on foodadditives which is quite important for building a harmonious society and promoting the foodtrade development.This article analyses the current problems in the process of using food additives in ourcountry. Also it tries to explore the influencing factors of consumers’ risk perception. Thispaper starts from both theoretical and empirical way to do this research. Theoretically, itmainly summarized different theories in the field of consumer risk perception developed bydomestic and foreign scholars, especially in the influencing factors of risk perception whichlays the foundation for the empirical research. According to the survey’s data, it describespeople’s risk perception on different food additives, especially the illegal additives. It tries toexplore the reason leads to the differences in peoples risk perception. Using principalcomponent analysis combined with the linear regression method, the paper explores theinfluencing factors of consumer risk perception of food additives substances. It adopts themethod of single factor analysis of variance to study the effects of demographic factors onconsumers’ risk perception.This article’s survey shows that the food production enterprises in our country havefollowing problems in the using of food additives: using expired food additives, excessive useof food additives，illegal use of inedible materials, etc. These problems cause the food safetyproblems in our country. It is also one of the crucial reasons why a consumer worries aboutfood safety. This research finds that most consumers worries about the excessive use of foodadditives and have negative feeling on food additives. Many people cannot distinguishbetween illegal additive substances and food additives. The empirical analysis shows that thesocial and psychological factors affecting risk perception can be summarized into four factors:the degree of understanding and controlling, the degree of trust, the degree of damage and thedifficulty in avoiding it. Taking risk perception as the dependent variable, four factors asindependent variables to establish the linear regression equation, we can see that three factorsincluding the degree of understanding and controlling, the degree of trust and degree ofdamage have significant impact on consumers’ risk perception of food additive substances.The degree of trust is not in the equation, which means its influence is not obvious. Fromthe coefficients, we can see that when consumers have less understanding of food additivesand are unable to control their intake of food additives in the diet, the greater the riskperception will be, also when consumers find it more difficult to avoid food additives or theyfeel the damage of food additives is more serious, their risk perception will be higher. Eachfactor has different influence on consumers’ perception, and the degree of understanding andcontrolling has the greatest influence among them. The study finds that whether the family has children under the age of18or not has significant influence on food additive riskperception. Consumers from family with young children tend to have greater risk perceptionthan those who come from families without young kids. Gender, age, marital status andincome have no significant impact on risk perception.