Due to correlations between purchasing patterns and diet disparities, differences in food shopping patterns and strategies across income levels and other socio-economic characteristics is a widely-studied research area. Most extant literature uses either primary or secondary data, which are often characterized by, respectively, limited geographical scope and considerable level of detail, or wide geographical reach but low detail. That literature also reveals contrasting results based on methods, data sources and geographic location. In this paper, we use three different datasets to characterize the differences in purchasing patterns across income levels, rural–urban status and other variables of food shoppers in the Northeastern USA and compare these trends with existing research. While many of the findings corroborate previous studies, new findings include less reliance on superstores overall, except for rural respondents, and a greater reliance on limited assortment supermarkets for SNAP and low-income households. Food purchasing differences are described by race and ethnicity, income and education, and children in the household. The analysis presented here includes a portion of the work performed by an interdisciplinary team of researchers engaged in the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture's Agriculture and Food Research Initiative project Enhancing Food Security in the Northeast (EFSNE). By using primary data from shoppers' intercept surveys, and secondary data from two large datasets, one of household food purchases and the other of food expenditures, we identify purchasing decisions holding at both the case-study (limited geography) and broader geographic (entire Northeast) levels, which both support previous findings and reveal the need for additional research in this area.

中文翻译：

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使用多个数据集加强对美国东北部食品购买模式的理解

由于购买模式和饮食差异之间的相关性，不同收入水平和其他社会经济特征的食品购买模式和策略的差异是一个广泛研究的研究领域。大多数现存文献使用主要或次要数据，这些数据通常分别具有有限的地理范围和相当详细的细节，或广泛的地理范围但低细节。该文献还揭示了基于方法、数据源和地理位置的对比结果。在本文中，我们使用三个不同的数据集来描述美国东北部食品购物者在收入水平、城乡地位和其他变量方面的购买模式差异，并将这些趋势与现有研究进行比较。虽然许多发现证实了以前的研究，新的调查结果包括总体上对超市的依赖减少，农村受访者除外，以及对 SNAP 和低收入家庭的有限分类超市的更大依赖。食品购买差异通过种族和民族、收入和教育以及家庭中的孩子来描述。此处介绍的分析包括由参与美国农业部国家粮食和农业研究所的农业和食品研究倡议项目加强东北部粮食安全 (EFSNE) 的跨学科研究团队所做的部分工作。通过使用来自购物者截取调查的原始数据，以及来自两个大型数据集的二级数据，一个是家庭食品购买，另一个是食品支出，