Files and links (1)
Dissertation-AfrinIslam764.67 kB
CC BY-NC-ND V4.0, Embargoed Access, Embargo ends: 05/01/2026
Dissertation
Consumer Behavior and Health: Role of Media, Food Choice, Lifestyle, and Natural Disaster
Washington State University
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
2021
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7273/000005529
Abstract
My dissertation includes three stand-alone studies that apply econometric methods to investigate how consumer behavior related to health is affected by health advisories in the media, food choice, health involvement, and natural disasters. The first study analyzes the impact of a 2015 health advisory report from the World Health Organization. The report classified consumption of more than 50 grams of processed meat daily as “carcinogenic to humans.” I investigate the causal impact of this health advisory and its impact on processed meat consumption. Using National Consumer Panel Data and a Difference-in-Difference technique, I find that the health advisory impact is short-lived, and household changes in behavior are heterogeneous by education level and gender within that group. Also, the average treatment effect varied by region of residency and age group of the at-risk households.
The second chapter uses the National Consumer Panel and MedProfiler data from Info Scan Data to understand the strength and direction of relationships among health beliefs, health involvement, and food choices. Using a multinomial logistic regression, the results show that health beliefs are influenced mostly by food choices, underlying health complications, age and food related concerns, and not so much by health maintenance. A robustness check using a probit regression confirms that food choices are the strongest determinants for concerned health believers compared to individuals having negative belief about their health.
The third chapter investigates the impact of a natural disaster on a children’s nutritional status. I focus on the 2015 Nepal earthquake. Using the Demographics and Health Survey for Nepal and deploying ordered logit as the main identification strategy, this paper fills the gap in the literature by exploring stunting, wasting, underweight, and anemia - all anthropometric measures of nutrition. The earthquake impacted short-term health status as the probability of being anemic or severely underweight and not long-term health outcomes as stunting. Location of residence, mother's education, access to information are crucial confounders of under-five child's nutrition status in Nepal.
Metrics
31 Record Views
Details
- Title
- Consumer Behavior and Health
- Creators
- Afrin Islam
- Contributors
- Jill J McCluskey (Advisor)Thomas Lloyd Marsh (Committee Member) - Washington State University, School of Economic SciencesR C Mittelhammer (Committee Member) - Washington State University, School of Economic Sciences
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- School of Economic Sciences
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 135
- Identifiers
- 99901052140301842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation