Supermarket Surveying

The last few weeks I've been busy preparing, writing, and re-writing survey questions to ask Chinese consumers about their rice-buying preferences. This weekend the surveying started. I got a group of undergraduate students together to help me and we entered Carrefour, clipboards in hand. Five of us hovered around the rice section and stopped people to ask for two minutes of their time.

I was scared, primarily because I generally hate being on the receiving end of such actions. We got turned down, but we also had people who were generally interested and wanted to talk to us. I was generally amused with how people reacted to me. Some people thought I wanted to import rice to my country so I was asking about the best rice. Others thought we worked for certain sellers, in the store to promote brands (this does happen quite frequently and 2 of the rice sellers for different brands there offered to help us out-we declined). And of course, I had a mother who took the opportunity to ask me to teach her child English.

I think some people stopped to find out about me. One gentleman I approached answered all of my questions; in between answers he asked my assistant about me. The conversation went something like this:

• Me: When you are buying rice, how important is the appearance of rice?
• Him: Very important. (To my assistant): Is she here to study or to travel?
• Me: And taste?
• Him: Very important. (To my assistant): Is she Russian? (never mind that he was already told I was an American PhD student doing research on Chinese rice).
• Me: Nutrition?
• Him: Somewhat important. (To my assistant): Her Chinese is good, where did she study?
• Me: Does the price matter?
• Him: The price is important as long as it reflects the quality of the rice. (To my assistant): Is she used to the weather here?
• Me: Do you think whether or not the rice is 'green' rice is an important factor in buying rice?
• Him: Green rice is very important. (To my assistant): Does she eat rice?

And so on.

I'm not completely satisfied with the surveys because there is only so much information you can get in a quick supermarket survey. I know the responses are quite limited and I hope to do follow-up, in-depth focus groups based on the survey results. But I do feel good that I actually collected data. I've been here for a while, talking to people about rice, reading about rice, and just thinking about rice. They have all been very important parts of the research process, but it feels good to have the beginnings of concrete data in my hands.

In other news, China announced greater food safety regulations on Thursday. It was in the news and in newspapers all over the place here. Is it a step in the right direction for China? Yes. Does it get to the root problem of China's food safety regulation and enforcement? No. Am I skeptical that things will get better as a result? Yes. Maybe cautiously optimistic is a good term to describe my reaction. Very cautiously.