Determining the factors affecting consumers' food preferences in restaurants: A scale development and application study

Restaurants, which are among the food and beverage businesses, can exist in a competitive environment by producing in line with the demands and needs of consumers. In this direction, businesses have to know and follow the demands of customers, catch and implement changes in line with current demands. This study aims to develop a scale for the factors affecting the food preferences of consumers visiting restaurant establishments. It also reveals the differences between demographic data and factors affecting food preference. Mixed method was applied in the study. The population of the study consists of consumers who go to restaurant businesses in Turkey. The study was conducted with the data of 20 experts, 70 pilot study participants and 386 participants obtained when erroneous and incomplete data were removed. In order to create the question items for the scale, a literature review was conducted and the questions in the question pool were directed to 20 expert participants. The question pool, which was edited with expert opinions, was subjected to pilot study. After the implementation of the scale, Exploratory Factor Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis were applied to measure the construct validity. In addition, in order to support these analyses, the suitability of the sample size, Bartlett's sphericity test for the distribution of the data, goodness of fit degrees, validity and reliability coefficient, variance value of the scale were also analysed. In order to test the hypotheses determined within the scope of the research, frequency tables, independent sample t test and ANOVA tests were used. IBM SPSS 25.0 and AMOS 26.0 programmes were used to process the data obtained in the research with the mentioned analyses. As a result of basing the findings on a scientific basis, the "Food Preference Scale" was developed and it was concluded that this scale has a usable structure to determine the factors that are effective in consumers' food preferences.