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Family buying behavior: A communication perspective
Abstract
This dissertation is a deep qualitative examination of intrafamily action during episodes of vacation planning and purchase. It serves as a metatheoretical counterpoint to the positivistic paradigm which dominates the literature. Employing the theory, Co-ordinated Management of Meaning, as theoretical framework, it seeks to reveal the social-constructed reality of intra-family meaning and action. Three cases are reported. Though demographically similar, these families co-construct accounts of vacation planning process and action which are widely divergent. The results indicate that vacation-planning and purchase is a contextually varied phenomenon which is analytically accessible through a rules perspective. Coherent intra-family meaning and action is identified by reference to context markers such as cultural pattern, family narrative, autobiography, biography, relationship, episode and age. Many different constitutive and regulative rules are reported. New light is cast on the varied local meanings of influence, vacation and consensus. Regulative rules are found to be a useful analytic device for examining intrafamily process. Families co-constructed dissimilar accounts of how they dealt with conflict in vacation purchase planning. These accounts rotate around systemic constructions of consensus, compromise and control. The findings call into question the universality of the knowledge claims of the dominant paradigm, whose concepts, constructs and claims do not capture the contextually varied processes expressed in intra-family action.
Subject Area
Communication|Marketing|Individual & family studies|Sociology
Recommended Citation
Buttle, Francis A, "Family buying behavior: A communication perspective" (1992). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9219412.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9219412