Conceptualization and measurement of personal norms regarding meal preparation

Past research has revealed that individual beliefs about the proper amount of time, effort and care that should be put into preparing daily household meals can lead to a moral obligation to cook regularly. Such perceived sense of duty may affect not only the frequency with which consumers prepare meals from scratch but also resort to using different home meal replacements. This paper presents the conceptualization, development and validation of psychographic scales that measure the direction and strength of personal norms regarding meal preparation. Literature review, qualitative research and pre‐testing generated a pool of 40 items related to the constructs of interest. These were subsequently administered to a random sample of 590 adults as part of a household mail survey on meals and meal preparation. Exploratory factor analysis and reliability testing of survey results produced four new psychometric measures with adequate construct validity: Personal norm about cooking, Awareness of the psychological consequences of ready meal use, Awareness of the health consequences of ready meal use and Ascription of responsibility for cooking. These measures can be used to segment consumers according to their personal norms about meal preparation. This will help nutrition educators and policy makers to target messages about healthy eating more effectively, and it may also provide valuable support to the product development and marketing activities of food manufacturers.