Fair Trade Attitudes and Consumer Behavior in Italy: a Comparative Analysis of two Attitudinal Scales

This paper aims to provide insights into consumer motivational systems and their relations with fair trade product purchasing behavior. In order to pursue this goal, the effectiveness of two alternative approaches, proposed in the literature and tested in Belgium and Germany, were formally validated in Italy. The two sets of scales were tested for predicting purchasing behavior by using a sample of Italian consumers. Although both sets of scales showed good internal reliability and statistical evidence of behavioral predictive validity, one of the two sets under assessment is able to depict actual behavior in much greater depth than the other.