Literature Review On Family Decision Making

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CHAPTER-3
LITERATURE REVIEW
1.1 The family decision making process
Early research on family purchase decisions centered on spousal influence across various decision stages (Davis, 1971). But gradually the scenario changed a lot. (Morwick, 1983) said that children and adolescents do form an important part of the family purchase decision process and they are also to be considered while making purchase decisions.
Influence is said to occur when an individual acts in such a way as to intentionally change the behavior of another individual (Cartwright, 1959). Perceived influence involves family members ' perceptions that they have engaged in actions that have a meaningful impact on the purchase decisions. Influence is “relative to” the influence …show more content…

Products used by the child (toys, dresses).
2. Household products (furniture, television).
3. Products common to the whole family (holiday, car, foodstuff, spending the leisure times).

1.3 Factors that need to be considered when examining children influence on family purchase
According to (Berry and Guber 1993) ‘‘children affect their families for everything which is the part of their lives’’. This influence covers a broad spectrum of decisions ranging from which food stuff to buy in the market to which computer or car to buy, which film to see or which restaurant to eat (Meyers, 2004). Some factors should be taken into consideration when examining children’s influence on family purchasing:
(i) economic factors;
(ii) interaction between parent and child;
(iii) conflict; and
(iv) …show more content…

Jenkins (1979) reports that children influence on the family purchasing decisions is much more intensive in families with high income levels. Similarly, Tansujah et al. (1991) has shown that the higher the income of the family, the more influential is the role of children to select the restaurant where they will eat. Beatty and Talpade (1994) verify that in the case where both parents are working the child exerts intensive influence on the purchase of durable products. However, this is not valid for the products the child uses. Lee and Collins (2000) stated that gender of the child has influence on the purchasing decisions of the family. Yeh and McNeal (1997) investigated the influence of Chinese children on the purchasing decision of their families and found that in 21 products the influence of boys and girls was equal. Also Wang et al. (2007) found no gender effect in child influence across all stages of family purchasing decisions. Other research showed that parents socialized their sons and daughters equally in regard to the amount of time spent with them, as well as in discipline and communication (Demo and Cox,

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