Assessing involvement with food: A systematic review of measures and tools

The construct of involvement has been shown to affect brand loyalty, diffusion of innovations, responses to advertising, and finally, food purchase choices. Despite the recognized importance of this construct in the food market, there is no agreement about the best way to define and measure it. This systematic review provides an overview of currently available involvement in food measures in order to understand the psychological domains covered and to assess their psychometric properties. Comprehensive searches of three electronic databases were conducted in October 2020. Studies were considered that aimed at developing a measure of involvement in food (FI) or that assessed at least one measurement property of involvement in food measures. Methodological quality of studies was assessed with the COnsensus-based Standards for the selection of health Measurement INstruments checklist. The titles and abstracts of 4160 articles were screened, with 258 full-text articles assessed for eligibility. Of these, 36 studies were identified as meeting the study criteria, 19 of which were measure development studies. A range of FI entries was captured by included measures. These were classified into five psychological domains: affective, self-expressive, situational, cognitive and behavioral. Regarding the psychometric quality of measures, the results highlight that the scientific quality of most instruments is doubtful or inadequate. Future research should focus on reaching a shared definition of FI, oriented by a solid psychological analysis of the phenomenon, in order to develop a comprehensive scale able to generate rigorous, comparable and readable results.