An investigation of the family purchase decision making process

Abstract

The study contained in this report investigated the relative influence of family members in making family purchase decisions. The husbands and wives were asked to rate their own influence on seven point semantic differential scale. After the data was collected, mean scores and proportions were computed and graphed .for comparison purposes. Further statistical analyses were also carried out using the spear mans rank correlation coefficient and' the t-test for paired observations. The findings from these analyses led the researcher to make the following conclusions:- (1) For the lower income families, the wives were found to dominate non durable domestic products, while the husbands were found to dominate investment products. The durable domestic products and the social/educational/health products were in the shared influence region. (2) In middle income families wives were found to dominate decisions over non durable domestic products while all other categories of products showed shared influence. Husbands were not shown to dominate any of the four product categories . .(3) In the upper income families husbands were found to dominate decisions on durable domestic products while wives dominated non durable domestic products. The investment products and the educational/social/ health products fell in the shared influence category. (4) The findings from: the statistical analyses showed that the mean scores attained by husbands and wives were not independent of each other and that for all the income classes and all the product categories the mean scores were not statistically different. (5) For all the three income classes, the general feeling of the parents was that the children mainly played the roles of initiators and information gatherers with children in their teenage (13-l9yrs.) being the most influential.