Discovery-Oriented Consumer Research

Caring and Conflicted: Mothers’ Ethical Judgments about Consumption

“…This discovery-orientated approach (Wells, 1993) enabled us to capture fresh and unexpected insights while simultaneously minimising the potential for socially desirable answers. After each interview, emerging themes, moral conflicts and mothering experiences were noted.…”

The development of initial trust in an online company by new customers

“…Several studies in the past have argued either against using such samples for research purposes or that the results should be accepted with caution [17,73,75,77,89]. Although it is easier to achieve internal validity with a homogenous sample such as undergraduate college students [30] and thus appropriate for theory building purposes [10], achieving external validity presents a greater challenge that can be especially acute in regards to behavioral studies.…”

The Social Uses of Advertising: An Ethnographic Study of Adolescent Advertising Audiences

“…The first reason is disciplinary. From its outset consumer research has borrowed heavily from cognitive psychology (Costa 1995, p. 215;Wells 1993) and as a result consumer research has developed an inherently individualistic model of the advertising audience based on psychological theories that, by their nature, concentrate on the individual as the "locus of meaning and significance" (McCracken 1987, p. 123) and that tend to de-emphasize the role of social context (Holbrook 1995, p. 93). Thus, despite the many advantages of the psychological heritage of consumer research, one of the drawbacks to this lineage has been the exclusion of many questions centered around the social phenomena that surround consumption activity (Uusitalo and Uusitalo 1981, p. 561).…”