Research

Ongoing Projects & Collaborations

The passion I have for my research is to a large extent a result of working collaboratively with colleagues, who bring their own enthusiasm to our joint work, and who challenge me to become a better scholar.  The network of colleagues I have developed through many years of collaboration help me to stay connected to the global research communities, something that is important when living in New Zealand, and I look forward to maintaining and growing this network for many years to come.  So, if you have an idea for research that you think I may be interested in collaborating on, feel free to contact me. Without any particular order, I have said a few words about the collaborative projects I am currently involved with. Past collaborations can be surmised from my list of refereed publications.

Since 2002 I have been collaborating with colleagues at the US Army Natick Soldier Centre, notably with Herb Meiselman, Armand Cardello and the late Rick Bell. Our first collaborative projects centred on understanding the importance of convenience in meal choice decisions and on uncovering the multidimensional nature of convenience. More recently, I have continued my collaboration with Armand Cardello in the area of scaling methodology, where we have been comparison the labelled affective magnitude (LAM) scale, which Armand co-developed with Howard Schutz, and best-worst scaling, which is a choice-based methodology originating in Marketing through the work of Jordan Louviere and colleagues. We have recently submitted a paper based on this work to Food Quality and Preference.

Because I often travel to Copenhagen (Denmark) to visit my parents, wider family and friends there, I have over the years gotten to know many of the sensory and consumer scientists at the University of Copenhagen (formerly KVL).  More recently I have developed a formal association with this group, in the form of a position as affiliated associate professor.  During my 2007 mini-sabbatical in Copenhagen, I became involved in a project with Michael Bom Frøst and Line Meilby that compares the use of OLS and PLS regression to analyse conjoint data.  Line presented parts of this work at the 2007 Pangborn Symposium, and we are working at full speed on getting a paper ready for Food Quality and Preference. Intending to return to Copenhagen University for yearly visits, the plan is to work with Wender Bredie and his team on a project about consumer attitudes and purchase behaviours for organic milk in 2008-9.

My interest in research methodologies that are appropriate for studying consumer behaviour took me to Sydney in 2006, where I met John Rose at the University of Sydney and decided to begin to do more research using discrete choice experimentation. John and I have undertaken a very nice study that is the first to combine state-of-the art experimental designs with advanced logistic regression to quantitatively explore consumer choices for different types of fresh fruit eating occasions and how these are influenced by the situational and social context of the eating situation.

Through my honorary position with the University of Auckland Business School (NZ), I continue to collaborate with my former colleagues in the Department of Marketing. I form, together with Peter Danaher and Rod Brodie the New Zealand contingent of a global project that looks at consumers’ decision making when purchasing wine in shops and at restaurants. The project has partners form more than 10 different countries and will try and identify different consumer segments, with different patterns of factors influencing their decisions. The project is doubly exciting by also having a methodological component, which concerns the use of best-worst scaling and seeks to assess its alleged proves for cross-cultural research. Two minor projects with a University connection that I still have on the go, are: i) an initial exploration at disposal behaviour for fresh fruit and whether this may provide insights not gained through the typical lens of consumption, and ii) a review of published scales for measuring purchase intention and recommendations for choice of purchase intention scale in food-related research. I am actively looking for a collaborator to help me finish this work, and would welcome hearing from you if you are interested. I am proposing to offer co-authorship in return for someone taking the leading role in getting the manuscript written. The ground work for the literature review part has been done. The empirical comparison of three different PI scales is also complete, as is the analysis of the data. What I need is someone to help me put it all together. The work was presented in poster form at the 2007 Pangborn Symposium and there was considerable interest in the findings, so I anticipate there would also be interest in the paper. However, I have too many other priorities to also get this one finished in a timely manner.

Probably the most consistent collaborator I have had is Roger Harker at HortResearch (NZ), whom I’ve been working with for close to ten years now.  These days we sit in adjacent offices and share science leadership for the sensory and consumer science team, he focusing on the sensory side and I on the consumer side. Working for HortResearch means that my empirical work gets focused on fruit and fruit-based products. However, I have a lot of flexibility to do basic science and address the science questions that interest me. In the research I’m currently involved in at HortResearch, these include gaining a fuller understanding of the contextual influences on consumers’ food-related behaviour, not only in the commonly studied locations of ‘at home’ but also in the retail setting, when actual purchase decisions are being made. My HortResearch colleague Christina Bava and I are collaborating with John Dawson in this area. Through Christina I have become more engaged with qualitative research methods, which is a great addition to my traditional more quantitative focus. It is also very rewarding to work with a talented emerging researcher like Christina. During the next few years, I will though my work at HortResearch become more involved in ‘health and consumer behaviour.’ I am keen to develop new collaborations in this area, so if you have an idea you think I may be interested in collaborating on, feel free to contact me. Having to bring home funding to cover salary for myself and the junior staff working with me, I am particularly interested in hearing from you if you are someone who already have grant money or a good track record in attracting research funding.

Through the Natick connection, I have also begun to collaborate with David Marshall and John Dawson at the University of Edinburgh (UK).  Some collaborations progress slower than others and despite the topic being one that I’m very interested in, this is one of them. In 2005 we began analysing 24-hour diet recall data collected from a large group of Spanish consumers. Rearranging the data into a format that could be analysed was half the battle, but we are there now and presented a summary of our findings in a poster at the 2007 Pangborn Symposium. The paper is in the process of being written, and I hope it will be done before the next Pangborn meeting ...

Although Conor Delahunty and I have known each other since the early 1990s when we were both students of John Piggott (University of Strathclyde, UK), we did not begin to collaborate until Conor moved to New Zealand in the early 2000s. Since then I have been involved with co-supervising some of his PhD students.  At the moment we are working together with Karen Hein, a PhD student at the University of Otago (NZ). Karen’s research centres on methodologies for hedonic scaling and how they may be improved to better take control of contextual influences on food preferences and choice behaviour. Karen presented on this work at the 2007 Pangborn Symposium in Minneapolis and we have a paper based on her talk in review at Food Quality and Preference.

I have collaborated with Rosires Deliza at the Brazilian Institute of Food Technology (EMBRAPA) since 2002. WE got to know each other during out PhD years at the Institute of Food Research in Reading. Our collaborations have centred on consumer acceptance of new technologies incl. Genetic modification and irradiation. Given the horticultural focus of the organisations we work for, the studies we have conducted to date have been on different types of fruit, including papaya, mango, banana and kiwi. Having presented our collaborative work in conference posters, it is great to finally have a paper in the peer-review process.

I also met Wilatsana Posri during my time in Reading, when she was a PhD student with Hal MacFie at the Institute of Food Research, and I a lecturer at the Department of Food Economics and Marketing at the University of Reading. Since returning to Thailand and taking up her own lecturing position, Wilatsana has been bringing research students to New Zealand. A project I have been involved in for a few years now has looked at the Food Involvement Scale (FIS) developed by Rick Bell and David Marshall and how it applies to New Zealand and Thai people. We have discovered that the original scale, which was developed in Western societies, is not comprehensive in Thailand.

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