CONSUMERS' COMPLAINING BEHAVIOR IN TERMS OF ASSERTIVENESS AND DISCONTENT; A FIELD STUDY FROM ESKISEHIR, TURKEY

Abstract

This survey intends to find out the consumers? post-purchase behavior in terms of complaining, assertiveness, discontent and alienation. In May, 2014, a survey is applied to 537espondents selected via stratified sampling from Eski?ehir, a city of Turkey with 700.000 inhabitants where 500 of the responses are found eligible... The respondents are required to answer 35 questions of which five are related to demographic characteristics of these respondents. The rest 30 are statements which are designed to reflect the behavior of these people. The study consists of five parts. The first part is an introduction where the scope and the purpose of the study are concisely stated. The second part relates to the theoretical background of the subject matter and the prior researches carried out so far. The third part deals with research methodology, basic premises and hypotheses attached to these premises. Research model and analyses take place in this section. Theoretical framework is built and a variable name is assigned to each of the question asked or proposition forwarded to the respondents of this survey. 30 statements or propositions given to the respondents are placed on a five-point Likert scale. The remaining five questions about demographic traits as age, gender, occupation, educational level and monthly income are placed either on a nominal or ratio scale with respect to the nature of the trait. Four research hypotheses are formulated in this section. The fourth part mainly deals with the results of the hypothesis tests and a factor analysis is applied to the data on hand. Here exploratory factor analysis reduces 30 variables to six basic components as: as: Consumer discontent, ad disapproval, consumer alienation, consumer assertiveness and redress, propensity to complain, claim for apology or refund Cronbach's Alpha for scale reliability is quite high (a = 0.788) and so is the sample adequacy ratio (KMO = 0.883) In addition non-parametric bivariate analysis in terms of Chi-Square is applied to test the hypotheses formulated in this respect. The fifth part is the conclusion where findings of this survey are listed.