Pangborn Symposium Dataset_FQAP

Description

Underrepresented populations in consumer research: An agenda for opening opportunities and closing challenges without hitting the PLATEAU Paper in FOOD QUALITY AND PREFERENCE JOURNAL ABSTRACT This paper develops an agenda for underrepresented populations in consumer research, highlighting both opportunities and challenges as well as ways to address them. Based on survey responses collected among attendees at the 16th Pangborn Symposium in 2025 together with data obtained through targeted LinkedIn posts in relevant communities (N = 104), we present preliminary evidence that matters linked to greater generalisability are deemed important on a wide array of parameters, including those linked to pressing societal issues, practical relevance and research practices, especially in applied relative to basic research. Adapted study designs, methods and analyses emerged as a key initiative to enable more research on underrepresented populations, while editorial policies that put a stronger emphasis on generalisability and sample diversity turned out to be the least popular initiative in this context. When asked to state which specific underrepresented populations participants would prioritize from a sensory and consumer research perspective, low-income populations were, by far, the most frequently selected category. Grounded in these results, we introduce the PLATEAU acronym, which describes the strong focus on People from Literate, Affluent, Technological, Educated, Anglicised and Urban settings, characterised by Western customs, consumption norms and food culture. We end the paper with several strategies and concrete examples on how to mitigate the present PLATEAU priority and inspire more research on underrepresented populations, while acknowledging complex challenges, including those related to systemic biases embedded in artificial intelligence.

Steps to reproduce

The survey began with five Likert statements, which participants indicated their degree of agreement/disagreement to on a 5-point scale (1=’strongly agree’, 2=’agree’, 3=’neither agree nor disagree’, 4=’disagree’ and 5=’strongly disagree’): (1) Sensory and consumer research needs to develop a more generalisable knowledge base; (2) A stronger research focus on underrepresented populations will accelerate finding solutions to pressing societal issues; (3) Research on underrepresented populations needs to be evaluated on criteria that differ to those currently in use; (4) A lack of people diversity is problematic for applied research and practical relevance; and (5) A lack of people diversity is problematic for basic research and pure theory development. The survey was opened in August 2025 during the 16th Pangborn Symposium and advertised to participants at the plenary oral presentation on which this paper is based. After the conference, the survey was posted on LinkedIn by the authors and further promoted via LinkedIn in relevant sensory and consumer research communities (e.g., The Sensometric Society, European Sensory Science Society). Data collection based on this convenience sampling approach was stopped in February 2026, with the final sample including 104 participants, most of whom (91 %) completed the survey during the Pangborn week. Two additional individuals who just opened the survey without completing the measures were excluded. The average survey completion time was roughly 5 minutes (4 m and 47 s), and participants consented to take part in the study by clicking an “Answer this survey” box. Means and standard deviations were calculated for the five attitude statements. A paired samples t-test was used to compare the responses for the two statements relating to applied and basic research. As a robustness check to guard against non-normality in the distributions of the Likert data, the Wilcoxon signed rank test was also used as a comparable non-parametric test. The ranking data were analysed using Friedman’s analysis of variance (ANOVA) with follow-up Bonferroni–corrected pairwise comparisons via a series of Wilcoxon signed rank tests. Further, we used Cochran’s Q test to examine mention frequencies pertaining to the checklist question on specific underrepresented populations that participants thought to be particularly important from a sensory and consumer research perspective.

Institutions

• DSM-Firmenich AG (Switzerland)

  Aargau, Kaiseraugst
• University of Agder

  Agder, Kristiansand
• Aarhus University

  Central Jutland, Aarhus

Categories

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