How Good A Shopper Am I? Conceptualizing Teenage Girls' Perceived Shopping Competence

Academy of Marketing Science Review,  2006  by Palan, Kay M

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In attempting to place this broad conceptualization of competence within a marketing context, we turned to the classic article on consumer expertise by Alba and Hutchinson (1987). They define consumer expertise as "the ability to perform product-related tasks successfully"

(p. 411) and further describe expertise as encompassing cognitive structures and processes that consumers use when performing such tasks as information search and decision making. Thus, the achievement of consumer expertise relies primarily on one's knowledge and how that knowledge is used when performing specific product-related tasks. Consistent with the previous discussion of competence, consumer expertise involves cognitive structures and processes related to both environmental and individual resources. For example, consumers have knowledge about different types of retail stores and salespeople (environmental resources) and how to act on that knowledge (e.g., avoiding certain types of stores and salespeople), just as they have knowledge about their own consumer skills (individual resources) and how to use those skills (e.g., return purchases within 30 days with receipts). Consumer expertise, therefore, is a reflection of objective or actual knowledge and does not incorporate the individual competence resources of self-confidence and self-control; subjective knowledge, which is how an individual perceives his or her knowing to be, is thought to be a combination of actual knowledge and self-confidence (Raju, Lonial and Mangold 1995). Alba and Hutchison (2000) argue that confidence about knowledge is based on expertise.

Based on this general discussion of competence and consumer expertise, we examine teenage girls' perceptions of their own competencies in the role of shopper, and we attempt to fit our data within the broader conceptualization of competence and expertise in order to provide a detailed conceptualization of the notion of shopping competence as perceived by teenage girls.

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A grounded theory method (Strauss and Corbin 1990) was used to explore data collected from in-depth interviews with teenage girls for themes, concepts and behaviors that were indicative of shopping competence. With this method, data are systematically collected and analyzed with the goal to either generate theory or to elaborate existing relevant theories with the data. Grounded theory development is often linked to existing substantive theories, particularly in providing direction to developing relevant categories and integrating data (Glaser and Strauss 1967). Given that theoretical conceptualizations of competence and expertise exist, our purpose here was not to develop new theory, but to elaborate on existing ideas to develop a conceptual model of adolescent shopping competence by placing the descriptive data within the context of competence definitions and conceptualizations from psychology and marketing.

face=+Bold; Sampleface=-Bold; Informants for the study were located through two different processes. First, members of girls' soccer teams located in a Midwestern town in the United States were asked to participate in the study. A convenience sample of 10 girls was obtained in this manner, and initial interviews were conducted with this group. Our initial analysis of these interviews suggested that there were new factors emerging, which caused us to seek additional informants through a snowball sampling technique. Using this process, initial informants provided names of friends for the researchers to contact, and those who participated from that group then provided additional names. In total, an additional 21 female informants were obtained in this manner. Sampling continued until the range of informants' responses was no longer expanding, but became redundant, consistent with qualitative data collection practice. Thus, the total sample is comprised of 31 informants (58% age 14); this sample size is consistent with that recommended by Morse (1994) for the grounded theory method.