Citizen food waste behavioural modelling support

Objectives and outputs
2.1Our aim from the overall project is to understand to what extent we can categorise people in relation to food waste reduction behaviours and further our understanding of key segments of the Scottish population. In particular, we want to understand those groups who waste more food and the intrinsic and extrinsic factors affecting their behaviour so that we can target behaviours with the highest impact and that are most likely to be influenced by behavioural interventions and easily adopted by specific audiences. The motivations and intentions of individuals to engage with food waste behaviours may be mitigated and influenced by their environment and abilities. We need to understand whether a behaviour can be influenced via behaviour change interventions targeted at individuals or whether wider structural or societal interventions are required first or alongside. To deliver this we are aiming to create a Scottish model of household food waste behaviours, and test the model using a survey. If the survey validates the model, we can then analyse the data to uncover new insights and evidence that we can use to target and design new behavioural interventions based on common factors that influence behaviours.
2.2This call off contract contributes to a series of projects we are undertaking this year to address a gap in our knowledge as outlined in 2.1 and to give us actionable insights we can apply immediately in intervention design. The insights gathered may also support us to adapt any existing interventions as necessary to ensure they fully utilise the knowledge generated through the survey analysis and are targeted correctly.
2.3Internally we are working to analyse and summarise some existing data sets and information we have on citizen food behaviours and the theorised causes and influences on these. This can also be used to support developing a causal behavioural model and generating hypotheses that can be tested in the survey.
2.4We need support to help us achieve the following: develop the behavioural model and hypotheses, develop a survey that tests the hypotheses, design a methodology for analysing the survey data, and support to analyse the quantitative survey data. The survey itself will be conducted through our survey provider. We also need support to analyse data from a previous survey.