Methods in Consumer
Research, Volume 1

Understanding consumers’ attitudes, perception, and behavior is of vital importance
for food choice research and new product development but also for policy making,
to support various current societal challenges. The consumer science field emerged
in the early half of the 20th century, mainly as a support to product development

and to identify the main drivers of preferences. Over the last two decades, the com-
plexity of consumer behavior has been increasingly acknowledged, and researchers

have become interested in studying other aspects of product consumption that also
play a relevant role in consumers’ decision-making process.