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This paper aims to present an analysis of the various dimensions of naturalness that shape the consumption practices of parents with young children.

The study builds on semi-structured interviews with 17 mothers and fathers focusing on parental decision-making in everyday consumption from pregnancy to the first years of the child’s life.

Naturalness is a tool allowing parents to navigate in a world of risks and part of an everyday consumption practice that constructs and maintains children as vulnerable and parents as responsible. Parents perceive naturalness as something with three dimensions: familiarity, purity and culture. These three dimensions lead to different parental practices around consumption.

The analysis contributes to the authors’ understanding of parenting, childhood, risk, safety and consumption by showing how and why parents of young children construct naturalness as a three-dimensional ideal in their consumption practices.

Adolescence is a period in which autonomy grows and where children develop into independent and active consumers and a period in which their food choices are also becoming more autonomous. Snacking is known to increase during the period of adolescence and the snack choice of adolescents is often unhealthy. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to know when adolescents perceive a snack as healthy. As healthiness perception could be linked to the perception of naturalness and sustainability of a snack, these are interesting product characteristics to study as well.

Semi-structured interviews with 20 adolescents were conducted to characterize their perception of healthiness, naturalness and sustainability. Chocolate snack bars were used as a stimulus product.

All participants mentioned consuming snacks because they like them. Healthiness was seen as important but was not always a priority in adolescents' snack choices. Naturalness and sustainability were concepts which the adolescents were not aware of or did not perceive as important during snack choice. The adolescents mentioned experiencing natural products to be healthier compared to not natural products. The consequences of the discerned dimensions time, impact and effect of choices were rather limited for this target group.

Understanding the healthiness, naturalness and sustainability perception of chocolate snack bars by adolescents may help to better understand drivers for adolescents' snack choices.

Packaging and labelling have become essential to how food manufacturers generate and deliver value to customers. The information displayed on the packaging can be used to communicate to customers the properties and unique characteristics of a food product (e.g. nutrients, calories and country of origin). To achieve communication goals effectively, manufacturers need to understand how consumers evaluate products based on their attributes. In particular, companies should be aware of which specific product attributes affect consumer buying behaviour and which product attributes are more critical during food assessment. So, the paper aims to investigate consumer's behaviuor linked to typical product attributes indicated on the packaging.

The present study examines consumer willingness to pay (WTP) for a cherry jam with different attributes (brand, type of production method and price) on a sample of 2,166 Italian respondents through a choice experiment using a random parameter logit-error component model.

The results showed that WTP for jams can be affected by attributes such as brand, price and production methods; precisely, they indicated that the level of naturalness in the production process constitutes the main element for the consumer’s choice; however, the considerable weight that price and brand have in influencing the purchasing behaviour of the food consumer was still confirmed: in fact, a p-value of less than 0.05 was found in all cases.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that assesses the effect of different types of production on WTP for food products. In addition, this study also reflects on the importance of the level of education for consumer choice.

The purpose of this study is to explore how consumers apply clean-eating criteria to a range of food characteristics, and the extent to which individuals are consistent in how they apply clean-eating criteria across products. Further, this study investigates how the clean-eating approach relates to underlying food choice motives.

Data were collected in a consumer survey (n = 666) in Sweden, where participants were prompted about the importance of a set of intrinsic food attributes of the “free-from” and “added” types, for three different food product types (bread, processed meat, ready meals). Data were analyzed using latent class cluster analysis, to explore segments of consumers that place similar importance to the food characteristics and hold similar food choice motives.

Clean eating can be described by two distinctly different attainment strategies: avoiding undesirable characteristics or by simultaneously approaching desirable characteristics. Notably, individuals who apply clean-eating criteria in their food choices strive for healthy, natural and environmentally friendly food, but the clean-by-approach strategy implies a stronger focus on personal health in the form of weight control.

While claims and labels on food packages concerning clean eating are implemented by food manufacturers, it remains unregulated. This study provides information for future regulations on how consumers apply clean-eating criteria, and their motives thereof. Further, the results provide insights food manufacturers regarding motives for clean eating in different consumer segments.

The purpose of this paper is to explore consumers’ health perception and demonstrate its relevance in product and process design in early stages of new product development.

A dried mango was used as a case study involving three countries: Indonesia, China and the Netherlands. Data were collected from nine focus groups (n=53 participants) and were content-analysed to acquire in-depth insights.

Four themes of health perception emerged, namely, nutrition, naturalness, taste and well-being, which were all expressed on different levels of abstractness. Participants’ health perception of dried mango varied, it is related to the product category it is compared with, e.g. candy or fresh fruit, and the eating context, e.g. position in the diet either as a snack or a meal. In extension participants mentioned product and process characteristics. Application of the insights into product and process design was performed through iterative interactions between consumer scientists and food technologists. The development of two product concepts was elaborated to transform the insights into technical product and process specifications for a natural dried mango product.

This transformation suggests that iterative interactions are necessary to achieve relevant product and process characteristics in the simultaneous design of the technical product and process specifications based on consumer perceptions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine mothers’ social media accounts that focus on children’s fashion. The authors probed children’s fashion photo practices as representations of the mothers’ extended self and the kind of childhood representations produced by the social media accounts. They also investigated mothers’ perceptions of children’s privacy when engaging in sharenting – the sharing of information about children or parenting online.

The study is based on 16 semi-structured interviews with Finnish mothers who had Instagram accounts focusing on children’s fashion.

Children’s fashion photos play a diverse role in mothers’ identity work. The photos can be used to express a mother’s taste and aesthetic skills, to express values, to fit into peer groups and to store memories of oneself and the children. Through the photos, representations of the prevailing Finnish childhood ideals, such as authenticity, naturalness and playfulness, are reproduced. The mothers perceived the children as part of their extended self and justified sharenting with mother- and child-centered arguments.

Through shedding light on the practices of social media fashion photography, this paper provides insights into how commercialism and social media shape cultural expectations for both motherhood and childhood. The paper contributes to previous research on sharenting, extending it to the context of fashion photography.

This study aims to explore students’ perceptions of the use of an artificial intelligence-generated content avatar (AIGC avatar) within a learning management system (LMS).

This qualitative research involved seven postgraduate students. Data were collected through individual, in-depth interviews. The videos of the AIGC avatar, created using Leonardo, ChatGPT and Heygen, were uploaded to the LMS to communicate with students for the purposes of a welcome note, assignment guide, assignment feedback, tutorial reminders and preparation as well as to provide encouragement and study tips. Students were interviewed at the end of the semester.

The findings of this study indicated that the majority of participating students held positive perceptions regarding the use of the AIGC avatar in the LMS. They reported that it enhanced their perceived instructor’s social presence and motivation to learn. The assignment guide and feedback were particularly valued by the participants. While some students noted the AIGC avatar’s lack of naturalness, others appreciated the clear and professional speech it delivered.

The study was confined to seven students from a single course at one institution, which may limit the generalizability of the findings. Future research could involve a larger and more diverse group of participants.

The findings may offer education providers an alternative solution for engaging students in an LMS.

This study highlights the potential of AIGC avatars to replace text-based communication in LMS and enhance students’ perceived instructor social presence.

Ethical consumption is on the rise amidst concerns about the environmental and health impacts of industrial agriculture. In light of increasingly complex food choices, alternative food networks have emerged. However, their success depends on a deeper understanding of the product attributes that guide (ethical) consumer decisions. This study focuses on the preferences of consumers when choosing and buying fresh vegetables in Romania.

This study employs a discrete choice experiment to determine how consumers make trade-offs across a set of product attributes, such as local origin and production method.

The study analysis sheds light on the importance of food attributes relevant to ethical consumers. The main barrier to making an ethically driven choice is convenience. While local production remains of lower importance than the production method, the authors show that the Romanian consumers surveyed strongly prefer non-certified “traditional” vegetables over certified organic products.

This study is pioneering with a state-of-the-art discrete choice setting looking at a set of product attributes that reflect the demand of ethical consumers in an understudied transitional context. The authors go beyond the current debate on the trade-off between organic vs local food labels by introducing traditional small-scale production as a separate attribute level. The food attribute preferences of different consumer segments and a market simulation offer relevant insights how to market fresh vegetables to health- and environmentally-conscious urban people.

When the probability of each model is known, a natural idea is to select the most probable model. However, in many practical situations, the exact values of these probabilities are not known; only the intervals that contain these values are known. In such situations, a natural idea is to select some probabilities from these intervals and to select a model with the largest selected probabilities. The purpose of this study is to decide how to most adequately select these probabilities.

It is desirable to have a probability-selection method that preserves independence. If, according to the probability intervals, the two events were independent, then the selection of probabilities within the intervals should preserve this independence.

The paper describes all techniques for decision making under interval uncertainty about probabilities that are consistent with independence. It is proved that these techniques form a 1-parametric family, a family that has already been successfully used in such decision problems.

This study provides a theoretical explanation of an empirically successful technique for decision-making under interval uncertainty about probabilities. This explanation is based on the natural idea that the method for selecting probabilities from the corresponding intervals should preserve independence.

With the increasing requirements for intelligence in the field of aviation manufacturing, manual assembly can hardly adapt to the trend of future production. The purpose of this study is to realize the semi-automatic assembly of the movable airfoil by proposing a human-robot collaborative assembly strategy based on adaptive admittance control.

A logical judgment system for operating intentions is introduced in terms of different situations of the movements; hence, a human cognition-based adaptive admittance control method is developed to curb the damage of inertia; then virtual limit walls are raised on the periphery of the control model to ensure safety; finally, simulated and experimental comparisons with other admittance control methods are conducted to validate the proposed method.

The proposed method can save at least 28.8% of the time in the stopping phase which effectively compensates for inertia during the assembly process and has high robustness concerning data disturbances.

Due to the human-robot collaboration to achieve compliant assembly of movable airfoils can preserve human subjectivity while overcoming the physical limits of humans, which is of great significance to the investigation of intelligent aircraft assembly, the proposed method that reflects the user's naturalness and intuitiveness can not only enhance the stability and the flexibility of the manipulation, but also contribute to applications of industrial robots in the field of human-robot collaboration.