Thanks for writing this up! I think this type of research is very important in the animal advocacy movement.
One thing I would like to see in one of these studies is using food purchase data instead of relying on surveys. This might be possible in colleges/universities where a large proportion of students have some sort of meal plan, and pay for their food using their student ID or some other similar card. In some places the students just pay to enter a food hall, and so you wouldn’t know what food they ate, but in other places I think each item is scanned individually. This approach would obviously require the university and/or food service company being supportive of this type of work, and being willing to share the data. They would of course also have to anonymize the data and it might be a challenge getting ethics approval.
I see two main benefits of this type of data. (1) it is likely much more accurate than survey data and (2) you are likely to have far more power in your statistical tests. There are a few reasons I believe (2): there would be less noise in the data (i.e. even if self reports are unbiased, they will likely have measurement error), you would likely have a larger sample size (no problems with response rates), and you could use continuous measures of meat consumption (i.e. ‘number of food items bought with meat over a week/month’ rather than just ‘do you eat meat?’)
Thanks for writing this up! I think this type of research is very important in the animal advocacy movement.
One thing I would like to see in one of these studies is using food purchase data instead of relying on surveys. This might be possible in colleges/universities where a large proportion of students have some sort of meal plan, and pay for their food using their student ID or some other similar card. In some places the students just pay to enter a food hall, and so you wouldn’t know what food they ate, but in other places I think each item is scanned individually. This approach would obviously require the university and/or food service company being supportive of this type of work, and being willing to share the data. They would of course also have to anonymize the data and it might be a challenge getting ethics approval.
I see two main benefits of this type of data. (1) it is likely much more accurate than survey data and (2) you are likely to have far more power in your statistical tests. There are a few reasons I believe (2): there would be less noise in the data (i.e. even if self reports are unbiased, they will likely have measurement error), you would likely have a larger sample size (no problems with response rates), and you could use continuous measures of meat consumption (i.e. ‘number of food items bought with meat over a week/month’ rather than just ‘do you eat meat?’)