Premium
The Association Between the Attitude of Food‐Waste‐Aversion and BMI: An Exploration in India and the United States
Author(s) -
Raghunathan Rajagopal,
Chandrasekaran Deepa
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of consumer psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 4.433
H-Index - 110
eISSN - 1532-7663
pISSN - 1057-7408
DOI - 10.1002/jcpy.1168
Subject(s) - psychology , discriminant validity , construct (python library) , scale (ratio) , construct validity , convergent validity , economics , food waste , risk aversion (psychology) , novel food , social psychology , psychometrics , developmental psychology , computer science , food science , financial economics , internal consistency , programming language , physics , quantum mechanics , waste management , engineering , expected utility hypothesis , chemistry
This research proposes the existence of a hitherto undocumented attitude related to food wastage: the attitude of food‐waste‐aversion. We develop a 6‐item scale including affective, cognitive, and conative components to measure this attitude and empirically investigate its properties in two countries using novel datasets. We test for food‐waste‐aversion scale's convergent validity by demonstrating that it is correlated in the expected direction with five theoretically related constructs—frugality, social responsibility, spendthriftness, self‐control, and materialism (Studies 1a and 1b)—and with BMI (Studies 2 and 3). We provide more indirect evidence of the scale's convergent validity by documenting that the link between food‐waste‐aversion and BMI is attenuated among those who practice refrigerating leftovers (Study 3). We also document that the food‐waste‐aversion scale is distinct from general waste aversion and external meal‐cessation rules, thus providing evidence of discriminant validity (Studies 1a, 1b, and 1c). Taken together, these results provide construct validity for the novel construct of food‐waste‐aversion. We discuss the theoretical and substantive contributions of our findings.