**2.3 Geographical analysis**

The fourth most powerful predictor of food behaviour change is the geographic location of the household measured along two spatial scales. First, sub-national regional differences adapted from ref. [12], and second differences between groups of countries in terms of their national consumption levels adapted from ref. [15].

The sub-national regional differentiation is shown in **Table 2** based on respondents' postcodes taken from the survey questionnaire, and then converted to specific European NUTS-3 regions using conversion data provided by Eurostat [19].

**Table 3** shows the percentage of households in each socio-demographic category across the six regional types. For the categories in household composition and educational level this shows that the overall sample is somewhat skewed towards households with two or more adults with no children and with higher levels of education, as is typically the case with such surveys despite some representative sampling. However, as described above, we are not comparing the proportions of socio-demographic categories or of regional types with each other. Instead, the analysis examines the changes in food behaviour within each socio-demographic category and within each regional type, the samples of which are relatively large with adequate variance at European level to justify significant statistical analysis.


*The Geo-Demographics of European Consumers' Food Behaviour in the New Age of Disruption DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.106938*


*Data show the percentage of households in each socio-demographic category across the six regional types. All data are statistically significant at the P < 0.05 level.*

#### **Table 3.**

*The geography of socio-demographics.*

**Table 3** shows distinctive socio-demographic differences between the regions, demonstrating a clear spatial sorting of household types within our sample which aligns well with data from ref. [20] some of which are included in the following summary (ignoring the 'urban' type as an approximate average of all metros):


The second spatial scale is at the national level and compares two groups of European countries based on their national Actual Individual Consumption (AIC)

#### *A New Era of Consumer Behavior - In and Beyond the Pandemic*


*Notes: The mean AIC in each group is calculated by weighting each country's contribution to the total by its 2020 population; SD = standard deviation. (For source of data see ref. [21] and, although new calculations have been made to take account of the specific countries used in this chapter and the creation of different groups, for full details of how countries are allocated to groups see ref. [15]).*
