Children’s influence on parental purchase decisions: Scale development and validation

Abstract

The article concentrates on the delineation between children’s participation and children’s influence in a family purchasing process. Lack of clarity between the two concepts results in misconceptions, inconsistencies, or even conflicting findings across studies. This study addresses the issue from theoretical and methodological perspectives. Taking into account the importance of children’s participation as a necessary, but not sufficient, pre-condition to demonstrate the influence, the study delineates the two variables and specifies the differences between them. This is supported with the development and validation of an alternative scale that directly measures children’s influence. Further analysis allows justification of the new scale and shows a theoretically supported difference between the measurements of children’s participation and influence in family-buying decision. The fact of making clear distinction between participation and influence leads to the enriched theoretical and methodological knowledge in the field and provides important managerial implications both in the family purchasing context and in other types of group interactions.