Consumer perceptions and stated intentions following descriptions of cultured meat and microbial protein: an exploratory within-person survey in Poland

Abstract

This dataset accompanies a cross-sectional study comparing consumer acceptance of two technologically novel protein sources—cultured meat and microbial protein exemplified by Solein—within the same Polish sample. Data were collected through a quota-managed online consumer panel administered by SurvGo among adults residing in Poland. Of 262 completed questionnaires, four respondents who selected the same response option across all 57 substantive Likert items were excluded, yielding a final analytic sample of 258. Each respondent evaluated both products using an extended theory-of-planned-behaviour framework comprising attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavioural control and behavioural intention, together with perceived risk, perceived benefits, perceived unnaturalness, disgust, moral acceptability and trust. The study also included dispositional measures of food neophobia, consumer innovativeness, naturalness orientation and environmental responsibility, as well as two single-item behavioural indicators: willingness to substitute conventional protein and price preference. The deposit contains de-identified coded item-level data and scale scores, a data dictionary describing variable names, constructs, response formats and coding, and the R and Python analysis scripts needed to reproduce the reported numerical analyses. It also contains the generated main Tables 1–3, Supplementary Tables S1–S11, Figures 1–2, careless-responding screening files, reliability and descriptive outputs, and results from the confirmatory factor analysis, HTMT2 discriminant-validity assessment, equivalence tests (TOST), cumulative-link mixed models and sensitivity analyses. Reproducibility: software and package versions are listed in requirements.txt for Python and R_packages.txt for R. Running scripts/reproduce_key_results.py from the deposit root regenerates the key data-based numerical results from data/coded_data.csv and data/scale_scores.csv. Separate Python scripts regenerate Figures 1 and 2, while the supplied R scripts reproduce the confirmatory factor analyses, HTMT2 assessment, ordinal models and associated sensitivity analyses. See README.md for the complete file map and recommended run order. Ethics and privacy: the study received a favourable opinion from the Research Ethics Committee for Studies Involving Human Participants of Poznań University of Life Sciences (approval no. 14/2026) and was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Participation was voluntary, and all participants provided electronic informed consent. No direct identifiers are included in the research dataset or shared files. The researcher did not collect or receive IP addresses, user-agent information or other direct identifiers. The dataset provided by the panel operator and the files included in this deposit contain no direct identifiers.