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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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Social status was inferred from each informant's area of residence based on the classification system developed by Coleman (1983). Using this classification system, 20% of the sample was judged to live in an area that was predominantly blue collar with some office workers, with the remainder of the sample living in better white collar or excellent areas associated with higher social status.

Since all of the informants were teenagers, informed written consent was obtained from each participant and her parent/guardian before inclusion in the study. Each informant was paid $10 as compensation for her time. The interviews were conducted over a four-month period, and interviews ranged in duration from 35 minutes to 75 minutes.

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face=+Bold; Interview Processface=-Bold; A semi-structured depth interview consisting of specific topical areas provided a framework for the depth interviews (see the Appendix). We were interested in exploring informants' perceptions about shopping competence as well as discussing with them their actual shopping habits and behaviors in order to build a full picture of informants' perceptions of themselves as shoppers. Much of our specific interest was in understanding teens' perceptions of their own competence as shoppers and what it means to be a competent shopper; thus, the interview format was designed with this in mind. To begin with, however, the initial set of questions was simply geared to motivate informants to talk about shopping in general by recalling a recent shopping excursion. Once they were comfortable discussing the topic of shopping, we began to delve more thoroughly into the specifics of shopping competence. Consistent with the emergent design method, in which data analysis is an ongoing process, additions and modifications to the initial interview questions were made throughout the research process (Taylor and Bogdan 1984). For example, several questions were added to further explore teens' interactions with salespeople when it became clear that this was an emerging concern among the informants, and additional probing questions were added whenever it was deemed to be relevant and beneficial to the research process.

Informants were interviewed privately in their homes outside the range of others' hearing in order to facilitate informant openness; all of the interviews were conducted by the two primary researchers. With permission, all interviews were audiotaped and later transcribed. Informants were promised complete confidentiality; to that end, informants' first names have been changed in the results section.

face=+Bold; Coding and Theme Developmentface=-Bold; Qualitative data from the interviews were analyzed using a grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss 1967; Strauss and Corbin 1990), an inductive analytical process. With this approach, meanings were discovered using Glaser and Strauss' constant comparative process (1967), a systematic comparison that looked for similarities or differences among the data.

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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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