A Meat and Dairy Article from All-Creatures.org

Speciesism and Perceptions of Animal Farming Practices as Predictors of Meat Consumption in Australia and Hong Kong

From PHAIR The Society for the Psychology of Human-Animal Intergoup Relations
July 2024

Speciesism and perceptions of animal farming practices significantly predicted meat consumption and meat reduction intentions in the Australian sample, but only predicted some of the outcomes in the Hong Kong sample.

Attitudes

Attitudes towards agriculture were measured using a 3-item measure developed for this study on a 7-point agree/disagree scale. This measure was not included as part of the main analyses for this study but was included to provide balance to the AFP measure and as a distractor from the main measures.

Meat Consumption

Participants indicated how many days per week they ate Poultry, Red Meat, and Fish/Shellfish on an 8-point scale, from 0 days to 7 days. Participants then indicated “In the next six months, to what extent do you intend to reduce your meat consumption?” on a 5-point scale from 1 “not at all” to 5 “fully”.

Participants also indicated which category best described their eating habits: I am an omnivore. I eat all kinds of meat; I am an omnivore. I eat all kinds of meat with a few restrictions (e.g., I do not eat beef, etc.); I am a reducetarian. I have substantially reduced my intake of meat compared to my prior intake (at least 25% reduction); I am a partial vegetarian (e.g., I don’t eat red meat, but eat fish or poultry, etc.); I am a full vegetarian. I eat no animals; and I am a vegan. I eat no animals or animal products (e.g., eggs or dairy).

Demographics and Donations

Participants indicated their gender, age, ethnicity, and education, and selected a charity to which the research team would donate $2 (see Northrope & Ruby, 2024).

Data Analysis

Both the Speciesism and Animal Farming Perceptions items met our criteria for configural and metric invariance, but not scalar invariance (see Northrope & Ruby, 2024 for full details). Thus, one can confidently interpret relationships between variables across cultures, but directly comparing mean scores in the Australian sample with mean scores in the Hong Kong sample is not advisable.
We tested Hypotheses 1 and 2 by running multiple regressions to determine to what extent speciesism and AFP predict red meat consumption, poultry consumption, fish consumption, and meat reduction intentions. We used independent t-tests to test Hypothesis 3, that omnivores endorse speciesism more and score lower on AFP than vegetarians. Given the uneven spread between the dietary groups, both omnivore groups were combined in to one group and vegetarians and vegans were combined into a separate group. We excluded reducetarians and partial vegetarians from this analysis, as they can vary wildly in their perceived and actual levels of meat consumption (Rosenfeld, 2018).

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Please read the ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE, including:

• Demographics and Donations
• Data Analysis
• Results
• Strengths
• Limitations

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Posted on All-Creatures.org: August 8, 2024
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