Fair Trade consumption in Italy: the role of personal values and contextual factors

Ethical consumption may be divided into ecologically friendly and socially conscious patterns. Among these two distinct aspects, in this paper we focus our attention on the second one. More precisely, we are interested to investigate Fair Trade (FT) products consumption, one prominent example of socially conscious consumption. Fair consumption signifies consuming with reference to fair terms of trade for poor producers in poor countries. Scientific interest and researches into socially conscious consumption and fair trade consumption, in particular, have grown significantly in recent decades. Several authors have researched about motivational systems and their relations with FT products purchasing behavior, so the relationships between values, attitudes, intention and behavior has been widely investigated with the aim to determine the flow of causality from the values, attitudes, intentions and purchasing consumer behavior. Numerous empirical studies consider the linkages between Schwartz’s values and behavior. From many empirical findings a flow of causality from values to behavior emerges suggesting that values may influence behavior both directly and indirectly through mediator variables. Among the mediators proposed to improve the relationship between values and behavior in the food area is the Food-Related Lifestyle (FRL) (Grunert, 1993; Grunert et al., 1997). Moreover, the motivational system that influence the purchasing behavior is strongly affected by the social context, that is socio-economic and cultural variables. Studies on values-behavior relationships have been conducted in a large variety of cultures (Davidov et al., 2008). The obtained results suggest the existence of similarities and differences of value priorities in relation to other variables, specifically related to socio-economic context that could be a relevant factor affecting personal values and behaviors and it could explain differences both across countries and within countries. Starting from this results, in this paper we aim to investigate the role of socio-economic context and personal values as intermediate mediator both on the intention and fair trade consumption product in Italy, where FT is a growing phenomenon but still very restricted. In particular, we aimed to assess how the level of economic development, the quality of life, the social environments and the Schwartz’ set of values, influence both intention and FT purchasing behavior. For this purpose we conducted a survey based analysis. Data on fair trade consumption and information on socio-demographic and economic characteristics, personal values, intention and consumption behavior were collected by means of a web administered questionnaire submitted through the website of the General Assembly of the Italian Fair Trade (AGICES), the most important Italian fair trade organization. More than five hundred and fifty responses were collected and analyzed using a structural equations model.