ADVANCEMENT OF THE PRACTICE
preparation point—has a clear temperature threshold that can be used to define whether the food business is compliant or not. More- over, temperature can be easily measured in situ, with immediate results that directly cor- respond with the compliance criteria. In contrast are those food preparation points and processes that are less com- monly assessed, such as allergen manage- ment and water treatment for nonreticulated water supplies. Here, in situ measurement is rarely achievable and verification would likely require the requisition of a sample for laboratory analysis. Rather than direct mea- surement of a critical limit, the assessment must rely on indirect indicators or proxies such as procedures, maintenance or clean- ing schedules, and records. Inspectors must then make discretionary inferences on the adequacy of control, as there are no data that can be obtained in situ and compared directly against compliance criteria. Yet while food preparation points and pro- cesses appear to be more commonly assessed based on the accessibility, immediacy, and interpretability of data that can be used for their assessment, this imbalanced emphasis highlights two key problems of coherence. First, foodborne illness resulting from the commonly assessed points and processes is unlikely to be any greater than the illness associated with less commonly assessed points and processes. Second, where data are directly comparable with compliance criteria, they might lack sucient depth and breadth to inform a coherent determination of con- trol. In their experiments, Ask et al. (2008) identified a similar trend of heightened pro- pensity for biased judgment as the ambigu- ity of evidence increased. Returning to the example of determining cold storage ade- quacy, measuring the temperature of a piece of food in storage and comparing the result against compliance criteria neglects to con- sider the maintenance of control before and after measurement. Additionally, this one- time measurement fails to assess the capacity of the food business to respond to a variation in circumstances and to monitor the mainte- nance of control. In viewing food safety inspection as quali- tative research, inspection methodology must a) facilitate matching corresponding evidence to claims and b) guide analytic reasoning processes relevant to the research
goal. Thus, the methodology must provide a sound investigative and interpretive frame- work, identifying the research questions to be answered and the necessary evidence to answer them. Although qualitative research most commonly aligns with inductive rea- soning through a sociological lens (Patton, 2002), the nature of food safety inspec- tion necessitates some departures from the qualitative tradition and requires a tailored approach. First, a tailored approach must depart from traditions in a theoretical sense by adopting a positivist stance that a single reality must be realized (Creswell, 2003; Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Patton, 2002). Hence, the regulatory-politico origin of food safety inspection requires a resolute out- come, which is often reduced to a classifica- tion of compliant or noncompliant. Second, although elements of micro-theory building might occur within a food safety inspec- tion, the analytical reasoning processes that occur in a food safety inspection might be strengthened if they are reoriented toward a hypothetico-deductive process (Crotty, 1998; Popper, 1959). Thus, adopting a hypothesis at the outset of the inspection that contamination is con- trolled—and subsequently deploying lines of inquiry during the inspection to nullify this hypothesis—gives rise to greater objective cer- tainty of those findings (Crotty, 1998; Popper, 1959). With reflection on these points, future research should examine how an investigative and interpretive framework could be devised for food safety inspection, adopting the deci- sion criteria proposed with critical reflection on the relative weight and validity of evidence and its translation into claims. Attending to Bias The third aspect of food safety inspection that can be enhanced by looking to qualita- tive field research involves mechanisms for attending to bias. The subjectivity of food safety inspection is another point of sustained criticism. Findings from our research indi- cate that little has been integrated into con- temporary food safety inspection approaches to respond to this issue. As with any qualitative research, food safety inspection is inherently subjective and vulnerable to bias from various sources (Dror, 2020; MacLean, 2022). These biases— spanning from self, system, and others—are
also influence the variance observed. Most notably, the outbreaks of bovine spongiform encephalopathy of the 1980s (Hueston, 2013; Scally, 2013), the 2013 incident of horse meat burger adulteration (Scally, 2013), and the 2016 incident of an undeclared allergen resulting in the death of a minor (Weaver, 2018) are all likely to have influenced regula- tory approaches to food safety in the UK. Incompatible Evidence The second element of methodological incongruence is incompatible evidence being used to inform determinations of adequacy and control. Again, a lack of clarity in the research aims and objectives of food safety inspection is leading to a misguided approach to data gathering and interpretation (Morse, 1994; Thomas & Hodges, 2010). This incon- gruence is exemplified first by the methods that inspectors report using to assess the adequacy of food safety culture. Despite the application of various methods to gather data and inform these assessments, the relevance of the data gathered via these methods is not explicitly linked to attributes of food safety culture (Wright et al., 2012). In contrast, in their food safety culture diagnostic tool kit, Wright et al. (2012) list other types of information that inspectors should collect to assess food safety culture (e.g., information about behavior, attitude, business owner- ship and leadership, employee engagement, communication and trust, confidence, risk perception, priority). Although the four pri- mary methods of collecting data regularly used by inspectors might capture some of the data necessary, they are largely incompatible with the types of data required for a compre- hensive assessment of food safety culture. Our results suggest an uncertainty among inspectors in how to assess food safety cul- ture, which is an observation already made by Nayak and Taylor (2018). Furthermore, our findings suggest that the accessibility and immediacy of some types of data, or their interpretability, might be a motivating factor in their acquisition over other types of data more aligned with the determination to be made. Hence, the most commonly assessed food preparation points and processes reported by survey respon- dents are those that have clearly defined com- pliance thresholds. More specifically, cold storage—the most commonly assessed food
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Volume 86 • Number 9
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