AUTHOR=Cheng Ling , Cui Haiyang , Zhang Zhiyong , Yang Mingwei , Zhou Yingling 

TITLE=Study on consumers' motivation to buy green food based on meta-analysis

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems

VOLUME=Volume 8 - 2024

YEAR=2024

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-food-systems/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2024.1405787

DOI=10.3389/fsufs.2024.1405787

ISSN=2571-581X

ABSTRACT=Although there is a certain gap between consumers' willingness to purchase green food and their purchase behavior, it is undeniable that the awareness of green development is an essential factor affecting consumers' purchase of green food, and it is also an internal driving force to promote consumers' green purchase behavior. Because consumers' awareness of green development is closely related to and oriented by their psychological motivations in terms of environment, health, knowledge, norms, prices, etc. However, the existing literature mainly focuses on a single region or a specific group, with a lack of cross-regional and multivariate systematic evaluation, and often ignores the potential influence of regulatory variables such as economic development level, product type and behavior type. Therefore, in order to further clarify the overall effect value of each motivational factor, this paper selected 8 causal variables and 3 regulatory variables that most affected consumers' green food purchase behavior and included 132 independent effect values in 45 research papers for meta-analysis. The results showed that: ① Consumers' green food purchase behavior was significantly positively correlated with eight motivational factors, including environmental awareness, health awareness, green attitude, green knowledge, subjective norms, price awareness, perceived behavior control, perceived usefulness; ② Consumers' green food purchase behavior is easily affected by economic development level, product type, behavior type and other factors; ③ The influence of motivation factor variables on actual purchase behavior seems to be weaker than that on purchase intention, which indicates that intervention measures should focus on transforming consumers' green food purchase intention into actual purchase behavior; ④ Environmental responsibility, government policies and marketing strategies can guide consumers to make more responsible consumption choices by interfering with consumers' psychological motives; ⑤ The results highlight the importance of increasing consumer environmental awareness and health awareness and suggest promoting the consumption of green food through policy support and marketing strategies.