Abstract
Consumers often engage in unsafe food handling practices at home, and various psychosocial and health-status constructs have been investigated to attempt to explain the underlying reasons affecting consumers’ use of such practices. We conducted a systematic review of these studies to synthesize the associations between psychosocial and health-status constructs and consumer safe food handling behaviours to inform future research and interventions. The review followed standard systematic review procedures including: comprehensive search strategy; relevance screening of references; characterization of articles; data extraction; and risk-of-bias assessment. Meta-analysis was conducted on odds ratio (OR) and Pearson’s r measures of association within unique data subgroups that were stratified by eight categories of behavioural determinants, five behavioural constructs, and two outcome types. A total of 66 relevant studies were identified. Knowledge was the most commonly investigated behavioural-determinant category (70%), but was only associated with one of the individual behavioural constructs: prevention of cross-contamination and practicing personal hygiene (adjusted OR = 1.56; 95% CI = 1.17, 2.06; I2 = 40%; n = 4 studies).