Michele Knaus, a graduate student of education at Portland State University, is researching consumers' motivations behind which eggs they purchase. At least some of the time, many of us choose to purchase more expensive eggs, considered "sustainable" or "value-added" with terms like cage-free, free-range, Omega-3 enriched, and so on. Why do we spend the extra money? What do we think we are getting in exchange, and are we right about what we think these egg carton terms mean?
These are the kinds of questions that the following survey hopes to answer. This website asked consumers to help contribute to our knowledge base by taking twenty minutes to complete this survey about what they think, and why they buy "sustainable" eggs. Our U.S. food system is in the media often these days, with topics like eating local, knowing where your food comes from, and food safety appearing in many books, articles, on websites and in news programs. Is this helping to draw attention to "voting with your food dollar", or just making the choices more confusing?
The survey ran from February 21st through March 1st, 2008, and we had 651 completed surveys - thank you all very much! If you are interested in seeing the survey results after the thesis research is completed, feel free to sign up using the email form on the left column of the website.
If at any time you have any questions, please feel free to contact the graduate student running this research project: Michele Knaus (mknaus @ pdx . edu). This survey research is done in partial fulfillment of a Masters of Education at Portland State University in the Graduate Department of Education, EPFA, Leadership for Ecology, Culture and Learning. Her advisor is Professor Dilafruz Williams.
This research is not funded by any outside source or egg industry-associated entity. Research student Michele Knaus would like to thank her husband, her advisors and the EPFA and LECL departments at PSU for their support. She would also like to thank Sitemason, quite possibly the finest Content Management System (CMS) ever developed, for donating the website and bandwidth.
