Food Protection Trends - March/April 2020 - 82

platform that distributes tasks such as online surveys to
qualified registered participants, who receive compensation.
Instrument development
The online survey instrument was designed on the basis
of previous literature on food safety and consisted of five
sections. Section 1 asked participants about their food safety
knowledge, including knowledge of cross-contamination
prevention, safe times/temperatures for cooking/storing,
and common sources of foodborne disease pathogens (10).
The number of correct answers was aggregated to obtain a
measure of participants' food safety knowledge. In Section
2, participants were asked to indicate their attitudes toward
food safety. A 5-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree and
5 = strongly agree) was adopted to measure participants'
responses to each statement (9). Participants' food safety
practices were measured in Section 3 with a 5-point Likert
scale (1 = almost never and 5 = always). Questions for
Section 3 were adopted from a study conducted by Bruhn
and Schutz (5). In Section 4, statements about the reliability
of sources of food safety information were presented to
participants, and responses were measured using a 5-point
Likert scale (1 = highly reliable and 5 = highly unreliable)
(5). Section 5 contained questions about participants'
demographic characteristics, such as gender, race, educational
background, frequency of receiving food donations/stamps,
household income, and previous experience in food safety
training.
Data collection
The survey was uploaded to the Qualtrics survey system
for data collection. A pilot test (n = 30) was conducted prior
to the final data collection to test the inter-item reliability of
measurement items and the clarity of the survey questions
and instructions. Cronbach's alpha values were calculated to
examine the internal consistency within constructs (32, 45).
Results of the pilot test revealed that the Cronbach's alpha
values of all constructs were greater than 0.9, indicating that
no further revision of the survey instrument was needed.
The survey instrument was then distributed to potential
participants in the Qualtrics system for final data collection.
Two filtering questions were asked at the beginning of the
survey to ensure that participants were adults from lowincome families. Only those who identified themselves as
"adults receiving foods/food stamps from local food banks/
pantries" were invited to continue answering the questions
in the survey. To ensure that participants read the questions
and provided reliable answers, two attention-check questions
were included. An example of this type of question was,
"Please select 'Neutral' for this statement." Participants who
failed to follow the instructions on these attention-check
questions were removed from the final data analyses.

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Food Protection Trends March/April

Data analyses
The Statistical Package for Social Sciences Version 25.0 software was used for data analyses. Descriptive statistics (means
and standard deviations) were used to summarize the data.
Multiple linear regression analyses were conducted to identify
the predictors of the dependent variables (e.g., knowledge of
practices). Statistical significance was set at P < 0.05.
RESULTS
Profile of the participants
Demographic information on the participants is provided
in Tables 1 and 2. Most participants had an annual household
income of $30,000 or less (n = 227; 97%). The majority (n
= 167; 82.7%) had received food assistance for less than one
year. More than half of the respondents (n = 132; 56.4%)
had some experience working in foodservice operations. In
addition, 107 participants (45.7%) had attended training in
food safety, and 92 (39.2%) had heard about or experienced
foodborne illness outbreaks. In terms of participants'
suggestions to food banks, 33 (14.1%) wanted the food banks
to stop providing foods past their expiration date, and 25
(10.7%) requested more food options. Additionally, 9 (3.8%)
suggested offering more healthful options, 8 (3.4%) wanted
other types of help, 7 (3.0%) requested improvements in the
service of the food banks, and 6 (2.6%) stated that the food
banks should ensure the quality of the food provided (18,
19, 48). Providing more fresh food, and more food to more
people, were each suggested by 12 participants (5.1%). Some
other suggestions were also provided, such as only providing
food stamps instead of requiring participants to visit the food
banks (n = 3; 1.3%), better hygiene among employees (n =
4; 1.7%), and shorter waiting lines at the food banks (n = 2;
0.9%).
Food safety knowledge
Participants' food safety knowledge was assessed with 21
questions divided into three categories: cross-contamination
prevention, safe times/temperatures for cooking/storing
food, and common sources of foodborne disease pathogens.
Almost two-thirds of the participants were aware that they
should wash their hands after touching their face (n = 151;
64.5%) and knew the correct way to store raw food in the
refrigerator (n = 147; 62.8%) and to wash food (n = 146;
62.4%) (Table 3). In addition, almost half of the participants
(n = 115; 49.1%) knew the most hygienic handwashing
method. However, participants seemed to have poor
knowledge about how often they should sanitize their kitchen
sink drain, as only 63 (26.9%) knew that they should clean
the kitchen sink every day.
With regard to questions on safe cooking times and
temperatures (Table 4), most of the participants (n = 191;
81.6%) showed a good understanding of the methods of
preventing food poisoning, and the majority (n = 164;
70.1%) also knew the correct temperature to which food
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