Consumer's attitudes to herbal products in Ukraine

Mgr. Yevhen Kutsenko

Master's thesis

Abstract:

Herbal products (HPs) were historically the first form of medicine at our planet, which people started to use with healing purpose thousands years ago. Since that time, modern medicine has achieved major success in prevention and treatment of different diseases. Nevertheless, due to numerous reasons we analyze in this thesis, people continue actively use HPs and their consumption becomes more and more popular worldwide from year to year. The main objective of the thesis was determine the attitudes of Ukrainian adult consumers towards herbal products and find out which ones are most commonly used and for what reasons. Willingness to use herbal products was examined according to socio-economic data (such as gender, age, occupation, education, marital status, residential area, family income) to analyze the dependencies. Primary data were collected by author through questionnaire survey, which was distributed in person in 20 towns and districts of Khmelnitska oblast in Ukraine, which has been chosen as a study area. The respondents were chosen via convenience non-random sampling method. The data were collected from 331 respondents. A Binary logistic regression method was used to determine the association between consumer preferences and selected socioeconomic characteristics. A descriptive statistics was used to summarize the main features of the sample. Based on the analysis, it has been found high level of familiarity with herbal products and high level of their usage by the respondents. The most popular herbal products were Peppermint, Lemon balm, Pot marigold, Camomile and St. John’s wort. The main reported reasons for using herbal products were gastrointestinal, immune, stress, skin, hair and nails problems as well as respiratory system diseases. In general, the respondents consider herbal products as efficient (54.7%), cheap (94.8%) and safe (81.8%) medications, but agree that their healing effect could be higher in case of combination with conventional drugs (81.6%).

Keywords

Consumers’ preferences, Food consumption, Health, Herbs, Nutrition

Jazyk práce: English

Datum vytvoření / odevzdání či podání práce: 23. 4. 2021

Obhajoba závěrečné práce

• Vedúci: Ing. Petra Chaloupková, Ph.D. dr. h. c.

Czech University of Life Sciences Prague

Faculty of Tropical AgriSciences

Master programme / odbor:
Tropical Agriculture / International Development and Agricultural Economics