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Abstract
The work presented here was conducted as part of an EU-funded five year project
investigating pathogens in the food chain, called "Control and prevention of emerging
and future pathogens at cellular and molecular level throughout the food chain".
Using a questionnaire, research was carried out with consumers in four countries to
investigate food safety information needs and information source preferences. The
work combined cluster analysis with a social marketing approach. Cluster analysis
revealed that the majority of respondents can be allocated to one of eight clusters
based on their information needs relating to food safety behaviour and pathogen
knowledge. The respondents associated with each of the clusters can be described in
terms of characteristics such as whether they have had any formal food safety
education, the frequency with which they discuss food safety issues, their preferences
for types of food safety messages, and a range of socio-demographic characteristics.
The results provide potentially useful information for bodies designing food safety
information dissemination strategies, and provide an approach for providing targeted
dissemination programs that are directly connected to information needs.