Neuroscience
The blight of Black Friday is upon us. What better time to look at a recent paper on compulsive shopping?
Sohn and Choi (2013) adopted a qualitative approach and recruited a small group of Korean housewives with problematic shopping habits via consumer news websites. These nine women ranged in age from 28 to 40. The authors identified their target group as individuals with compulsive buying disorder, who reported a "preoccupation with shopping, pre-purchase tension or anxiety, and sense of relief following the purchase defined by Faber and O’Guinn (1992)." The participants all had high scores on the Faber and O’Guinn 14 item "compulsive buying checklist."
The authors conducted in-depth 2 hour interviews with each participant and analyzed the data according to a six-step contents analysis (Kim et al. 1999) that derived concept clusters, subcategories, and categories. Of note are these Five Sequential Phases of Shopping Addiction (Sohn & Choi, 2013):
Accompanying these phases are 5 themes, 15 subthemes, and 43 codes (shown in detail below).
Do you have a strong urge to purchase the latest Xbox One or PS4 before they sell out? Would you feel anxious if you didn't get one? If so, then you may be in Phase IV, Impulsive Buying.
But if you go to the mall every morning and shop online every day, it's all over. You've reached Phase V, Compulsive Buying.
Reference
Sang-Hee Sohn and Yun-Jung Choi (2013). Phases of Shopping Addiction Evidenced by Experiences of Compulsive Buyers. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction DOI: 10.1007/s11469-013-9449-y
- When Women Prefer Taller Men
Women who are in the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle, or who are looking for a short-term relationship, tend to prefer taller men. That’s according to Polish researchers Boguslaw Pawlowski and Grazyna Jasienska who asked 110 women to look at...
- When Three's A Crowd
When people go shopping they prefer not to be alone in the aisle. That’s according to Jennifer Argo and colleagues who watched dozens of student participants while they went into a shop to buy some batteries. The students thought they were participating...
- Moocs: Harvardx "fundamentals Of Clinical Trials"
The HarvardX edX course "Fundamentals of Clinical Trials" started yesterday. Here is some information about the course [click here]. The content for Week One is quite good and presented well by the course faculty. From the course information page: [snip]...
- Rhythmic Constraints On Stress Timing In English
What kind of embodied constraints affect the production of speech? Can we say anything we like when we like, or are there constraints in play that make some things easier than others? This is the question asked in Cummins & Port (1998) which we recently...
- The Embodied Cognition Of Tesco's Gendered Toys
Update: giving them information in a useful way changed their behaviour! Tesco got in trouble on the internet last week for having toy chemistry sets labelled as being for boys, not girls in their online store. There's a lot of noise about...
Neuroscience
The Phases of Shopping Addiction
The blight of Black Friday is upon us. What better time to look at a recent paper on compulsive shopping?
Sohn and Choi (2013) adopted a qualitative approach and recruited a small group of Korean housewives with problematic shopping habits via consumer news websites. These nine women ranged in age from 28 to 40. The authors identified their target group as individuals with compulsive buying disorder, who reported a "preoccupation with shopping, pre-purchase tension or anxiety, and sense of relief following the purchase defined by Faber and O’Guinn (1992)." The participants all had high scores on the Faber and O’Guinn 14 item "compulsive buying checklist."
The authors conducted in-depth 2 hour interviews with each participant and analyzed the data according to a six-step contents analysis (Kim et al. 1999) that derived concept clusters, subcategories, and categories. Of note are these Five Sequential Phases of Shopping Addiction (Sohn & Choi, 2013):
Phase 1. Retail therapy, “Filling up emptiness with shopping”
Phase 2. Denial, “Ignoring overconsumption”
Phase 3. Debt-ridden, “Ran out of money, while nothing left”
Phase 4. Impulsive buying, “Driving ones-self to hasty buying”
Phase 5. Compulsive buying, “It is crazy but I cannot stop”
Accompanying these phases are 5 themes, 15 subthemes, and 43 codes (shown in detail below).
- click on image for a larger view -
Do you have a strong urge to purchase the latest Xbox One or PS4 before they sell out? Would you feel anxious if you didn't get one? If so, then you may be in Phase IV, Impulsive Buying.
But if you go to the mall every morning and shop online every day, it's all over. You've reached Phase V, Compulsive Buying.
Reference
Sang-Hee Sohn and Yun-Jung Choi (2013). Phases of Shopping Addiction Evidenced by Experiences of Compulsive Buyers. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction DOI: 10.1007/s11469-013-9449-y
- When Women Prefer Taller Men
Women who are in the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle, or who are looking for a short-term relationship, tend to prefer taller men. That’s according to Polish researchers Boguslaw Pawlowski and Grazyna Jasienska who asked 110 women to look at...
- When Three's A Crowd
When people go shopping they prefer not to be alone in the aisle. That’s according to Jennifer Argo and colleagues who watched dozens of student participants while they went into a shop to buy some batteries. The students thought they were participating...
- Moocs: Harvardx "fundamentals Of Clinical Trials"
The HarvardX edX course "Fundamentals of Clinical Trials" started yesterday. Here is some information about the course [click here]. The content for Week One is quite good and presented well by the course faculty. From the course information page: [snip]...
- Rhythmic Constraints On Stress Timing In English
What kind of embodied constraints affect the production of speech? Can we say anything we like when we like, or are there constraints in play that make some things easier than others? This is the question asked in Cummins & Port (1998) which we recently...
- The Embodied Cognition Of Tesco's Gendered Toys
Update: giving them information in a useful way changed their behaviour! Tesco got in trouble on the internet last week for having toy chemistry sets labelled as being for boys, not girls in their online store. There's a lot of noise about...