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- Title
Students as Subjects in Consumer Behavior Experiments.
- Authors
Enis, Ben M.; Cox, Keith K.; Stafford, James E.
- Abstract
During a series of consumer behavior studies being conducted with housewives, it was decided to replicate the studies with students from our marketing principles courses. The purpose of the project was to test the hypothesis that students' responses in consumer behavior studies accurately reflect housewives' responses. Two sets of experiments were conducted: one concerned the influence of race of model upon consumers' perceptions of advertisements and the other studied bias related to country of origin in glassware preference. Since this question is pertinent to research in marketing, further research should be done in the area. We believe that this research will benefit from consideration of several methodological issues encountered in the present study. First, improvements could certainly be made in our study, since comparison of the housewives' responses with those of students was not part of the original design. A study designed expressly to investigate this question would no doubt incorporate more than 11 points of comparison between housewives and students. Second, the artificial (laboratory) setting of the experiments may have affected the students differently than it did the housewives. For instance, the products (particularly the goblets) may have been of less interest to the students than to the housewives. Even if such improvements were made in future studies, however, three fundamental questions would remain: 1. Is statistical inference an appropriate research tool for studies of this type? Respondents were not randomly selected, yet generalization of results is desirable--a situation typical of many academic research studies. Basic methodological research might provide a more secure foundation for such uses of statistical significance. 2. If statistical inference is to be used, what tests are appropriate for data of this type? It could be argued on the one hand, that such assumption as interval scales and normality are not warranted, and there...
- Subjects
CONSUMER research; STUDENTS as consumers; HOUSEWIVES as consumers; CONSUMER behavior; CONSUMER attitudes; CONSUMER preferences; WOMEN consumers; STATISTICAL reliability; MARKETING research; GLASSWARE; MARKETING
- Publication
Journal of Marketing Research (JMR), 1972, Vol 9, Issue 1, p72
- ISSN
0022-2437
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2307/3149612