Food Safety in China: The Structure and Substantive Foci of an Emerging Field of Social Science Research

Harley D. Dickinson, Willa Liu, Paul J. Graham and Wei Chen
Additional contact information
Harley D. Dickinson: Department of Sociology, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK S7N 5A5, Canada
Willa Liu: Centre for Women Studies in Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S 1V6, Canada
Paul J. Graham: Library Services, Yorkville University, Fredericton, NB E3C 2R9, Canada
Wei Chen: Department of Sociology, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK S7N 5A5, Canada

Social Sciences, 2018, vol. 7, issue 7, 1-14

Abstract: This paper is the first to describe the structure and content of the English language social science literature on food safety in China. To do this research we systematically searched Web of Science and Scopus, the most comprehensive indexes, using the terms “Food Safety” AND “China” OR “Chinese”. To focus our search results, we used the index features available on Web of Science and Scopus, and limited results to the English language, peer-reviewed journal articles, social sciences, and published in the period of 2009 to 2015. This resulted in 272 selected journal articles, with a final data set of 185 articles for review. A food safety system model we developed was used to classify and present the findings derived from content analysis of abstracts, titles, and keywords. Our findings show that the research reviewed is unevenly distributed across the components of the food safety system model. The greatest proportions of the literature reviewed focused on consumers, primary and secondary producers and products, and government legislators and regulators, respectively. Smaller proportions focused on food wholesalers, retailers, researchers, educators, and the media. Few of the articles reviewed used a model of the food safety system. None identified an explicit knowledge transfer strategy.

Keywords: food safety; food safety system; social sciences; literature mapping; abstract analysis; keyword analysis; China; NVivo Software (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/7/7/107/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/7/7/107/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jscscx:v:7:y:2018:i:7:p:107-:d:154465

Access Statistics for this article

Social Sciences is currently edited by Ms. Yvonne Chu

More articles in Social Sciences from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().