Applying theory of planned behavior (TPB) to food waste behavior of university students in Hong Kong

Abstract

The purpose of this present research was to examine the applicability of the theory of planned behavior toward the food waste issue in Hong Kong. The university students in Hong Kong will be mainly targeted for this research to examine their food waste attitude, intention to avoid food waste, subjective norm, moral norm and situational factors. The sample consisted of 156 students from different universities in Hong Kong, among them, 64.4% were currently studying in City University of Hong Kong, and 35.3% were studying in universities other than City University of Hong Kong. The food waste attitude, intention to avoid food waste, subjective norm, moral norm and situational factors were measured by “7-point bipolar Likert scale” developed by Ajzen (2013), and the scale was further refined by Lavén (2017) to be tailor-made for examining food waste behavior. The scale was found to be reliable as food waste attitude, intention to avoid food waste and moral norm were having value of Cronbach α exceeded 0.7, while situational factors and subjective norm were having the value of Cronbach α above 0.6, which implicated a moderate reliability as well (Hinton, McMurray & Brownlow, 2014). It was noteworthy that the intention to avoid food waste was the strongest predictor to predict a respondent in taking away the leftovers regardless of the prices (i.e. cheap and expensive) and the location (i.e. in-campus restaurants and outside-campus restaurants). While, food waste attitude, moral norm and religious belief were significant to predict respondents to take away in in-campus restaurants; moral norm, gender and total years of study were significant to predict respondents to take away in outside-campus restaurants. The results could contribute in understanding the factors behind university student’s food waste behavior and urge the government, restaurants and different universities to review on their food-wasterelated policies.