Food Safety: the Interrelationships among Trust, Risk Perception, Mother'S Health Behavior and Child Development

Food safety issues can influence significantly on maternal, infant and child health. This is a three-year study. The first two years will focus on the interrelationships among trust, risk perception, mother’s health behaviors, mother’s and child’s mercury exposure as well as child development. The third year will use a mixed method study design to understand the differences in the risk perception, health behavior, mother’s and child’s mercury exposure, and child development status by socioeconomic status.This study will collect data at a pediatric clinic belonged to a teaching hospital in northern region of Taiwan. The study uses a quota sampling method to collect 384 mothers and their child who is aged under 6 years old. The outcome variables are child development status and mother’s and child’s mercury exposure. The independent variables include trust in government management, trust in science, and trust in different sources of information, risk perception, and precautious health behaviors. The control variables include sociodemographic characteristics, food safety knowledge, social networks, health status, previous exposure, and child’s allergy et al. About the statistical analyses, in addition to univariate and bivariate analyses, this study will use structural equation modeling to analyze the interrelationship among main variables and other methods (i.e., Sobel Test) to conduct mediator analysis.This study uses a mixed method study design in the third year. The purpose is to examine and understand the role of socioeconomic status in food safety. First, this study will use the data collected in the first and second year to analyzed factors associated with child development, mercury exposure, risk perception, and health behaviors by high and low socioeconomic status, which is determined by the median point of the socioeconomic distribution in the whole sample. The results of the quantitative analysis will inform and shape the following qualitative research questions. In the qualitative part of the study, this study uses an extreme sampling method to draw 12 mothers in the lowest and the highest quintiles of family income and conduct in-depth interviews, respectively; the total sample is 24. The qualitative analysis procedure will generate codes and themes from the transcription of the interviews and use constant comparison method to enhance the theoretical interpretation of the phenomenon.