Questionnaire: Fast-Food Paradox

Authors: Sébastien BERTHELOT, Julien BRECHETEAU and Loïc TOUPIN

More and more fast-food restaurants in France are growing and meet a great success. However, public opinion remains quite negative for this type of restoration (with increasing obesity....). So, we notice a fast food restaurants paradox: they have a bad image but meet with true success!
In this survey, we only considered McDonald's and Quick restaurants. We tried to understand what image people have of fast food restaurants and study the reasons for this success. What are the negative aspects of these ones that contribute to their bad image and which ones attract consumers?

The typology of consumers to whom we thought before analysis separates them in three different classes:

  • Individuals having a very good image of fast food restaurants (only positives points)
  • Individuals verifying the fast food restaurants paradox: they have a bad image but find positive points there because they are regular consumers
  • Individuals having a very bad image of fast food restaurants (only negatives points)

We made our questionnaire with active variables to see how individuals perceive fast food restaurants on scales from 1 to 5 (price, type of consumer, products appreciation, nutrition, practicality, conviviality...). Finally, to complete our study we also chose descriptive variables and illustrative variables (multiple or single choice) concerning consumer habits (the moment, with whom, consumed products, price bracket...) to see if these are related to the image they have.
Our dataset consists of 20 active variables, 28 illustrative variables and 166 students having filled in our questionnaire.

Then, we performed a classification of our individuals:

  • The class 1 is characterized by individuals who have a good image of this type of restoration, who greatly appreciate the product and who are faithful consumers
  • The class 2 is characterized by individuals who have a bad image of fast food restaurants because they find products too expensive. However, they are fairly regular consumers who are quite satisfied with this type of restoration
  • The class 3 is characterized by individuals having a very bad image and who do not like at all the fast foods and their products. They are very scarce consumers

We got close to the typology we expected. A third of students have a very good image and are faithful consumers. We noticed that the price and nutritional quality are a source of bad image. The success of fast food restaurants is mainly due to pleasure taken (hedonic) and practicality.

Find here the data set and the R script:

The results of the ENMCA() function are the following:

Beware the results of HCPC() and ENMCA() are not quite the same since the data are ventilated and the method of classification is a bit different.