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Journal Articles
December 2009 (Blackwell Publishing)
Article
The Use of Scanner Data for Research into Nutrition
Type: Journal Articles
ISSN: Print 0143-5671 Online: 1475-5890
Volume, issue, pages: Vol. 30, No. 3-4, pp.339-365
JEL classification: D12, I1
Keywords: nutrition, sample duration, household panel data, market research data

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Data from market research firms are increasingly being used by social science researchers. These data provide potentially useful information, including detailed nutritional information and well-measured prices, and their panel structure is appealing as it permits researchers to control for unobservable time-invariant household characteristics and to model dynamic aspects of household behaviour. We summarise the information on the nutrients in foods that is contained in one source of market research data. We show that there is a lot of variation in nutrients at the individual product level, even within narrowly defined food categories such as butter. We also show that the duration of time over which data are collected can have important implications for analysis of household-level nutrient purchases.

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IFS develops data on food prices and nutrition to build capacity for policy-relevant social science research.