Cox DN 1, Evans G 1, Kermarrec C 2, Sable T 2

1 CSIRO Food Futures National Research Flagship, CSIRO Human Nutrition, PO Box 10041, Adelaide BC, SA 5000, Australia; 
2 INSFA, Rennes, France

The ability to identify early adopters of innovative products, produced using novel technologies, could be useful particularly when such foods may facilitate health benefits.  Cox & Evans (2008) recently developed and validated the Food Technology Neophobia Scale (FTNS).  Further validation (test-re-test) assessing scale stability and reliability was undertaken.

Participants (n = 131, regular consumers of the foods of interest: orange juice, yoghurt, prawns, smoked salmon and bread) attended laboratory sessions on two occasions.  During session 1, participants responded to the FTNS, descriptions of technologies (pasteurisation, bioactives, triploidy, selective breeding, genetic modification, fortification and nanotechnology, all having consumer benefits), ‘willing to try’ food technologies and ‘expected hedonics’ of each product (food x technology) and socio-demographic questions.  At session 2 (28 days later) they repeated responses to the FTNS, the food descriptions, and were given the option of consuming foods to give an ‘experienced’ hedonic rating. Lastly, information seeking was measured as an ‘exogenous shock’.

Responses did not differ by socio-demographics, except for educational status, or information seeking. FTNS test-retest scores intra-class correlation was 0.76 and Cronbach’s alpha was 0.86 indicating stability and internal reliability. There was no mean difference over time and the overall mean FTNS score (53.98, se 0.91) did not differ (p>0.05) from a previous study (Cox & Evans, 2008) on a similar population.  All responses to novel technologies: genetic modification (-0.58), triploidy, (-0.44), fortified (-0.39) and nanotechnology (-0.39), were strongly negatively correlated (p < 0.01) to the FTNS mean score.

The FTNS is confirmed as being a stable, reliable and predictive measure of questionnaire responses to novel food technologies however responses to the experience of tasting foods is also required.

Reference:
Cox DN & Evans G. (2008) Food Quality & Preference 19 704–710

Keywords: technology; psychometric scale; stability; reliability