Modeling of food safety knowledge, attitude, and behavior characteristics

Abstract

In 2016-2017, foodborne outbreaks in Indonesia were mostly due to foods from households and street food vendors, indicating that people do not understand and apply food safety practices properly. In 2015, the government of Indonesia initiated a community-based food safety empowerment program to increase food safety knowledge, attitude and behavior of selected communities. Knowledge, attitude, and behavior are variables which can appropriately be analyzed by multivariate analysis. This study aimed to determine the characteristics and relationships of food safety knowledge, attitude and behavior in the intervened communities using the Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) method. The study used purposive method to establish the respondents and developed a questionnaire to collect the responses. A total of 254 respondents were obtained from 9 urban areas in DKI Jakarta Province. Analysis using PLS-SEM concluded one statement for knowledge, three statements for attitude, and six statements for behavior as the statement characteristics for food safety. Results of this study suggest that knowledge affects food safety attitude and behavior significantly, but attitude does not influence behavior significantly. These results indicated the need to improve food safety knowledge in order to improve food safety attitude and behavior of the communities. However, it is important to realize that the transformation of attitude into behavior requires other factors such as environmental support and ease of the application of the principle of food safety.