Abstract
In this study we focused on the methodological insights, the measurement and evaluation of compulsive buying tendencies among young consumers in Poland. We administered the Compulsive Buying Scale (CBS) developed by d’Astous et al. (in: Goldberg, Gorn, Pollay (eds) Advances in consumer research, Association for Consumer Research, Provo, 1990) for North America and adapted it to the Polish population. Then used the data to develop a Polish version of the Compulsive Buying Scale (P-CBS). The study extended previous methodological work on new consumers’ culture, and more importantly, investigated the compulsive buying in two groups of consumers: compulsive- and non-compulsive buyers. The sample comprised 504 young Polish citizens, aged between 17 and 25 years. In the complex analytical process, we replicated the three-dimensional structure of the CBS scale (d'Astous et al. 1990): the ‘Tendency to Spend’, a 'Reactive Aspect' of compulsive buying, and 'Post Purchase Guilt'. This process included the following steps: the translation of the items, an exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, based on latent variables theory, and a reliability and validity analysis. Data analyses indicated a satisfactory reliability and validity of the P-CBS. Research findings are presented across the sample and the subsamples of compulsive buyers and non-compulsive buyers.
Highlights
Scholars around the world differ in their methods of understanding compulsive buying behavior as a market phenomenon
The literature on compulsive buying reports many other scales that allow to measure this phenomenon as for instance, the Clinical Screener (Faber and O’Guinn 1992), Questionnaire About Buying Behavior (QABB; Lejoyeux and Ades 1994; Lejoyeux et al 2007), the Richmond Compulsive Buying Scale (RCBS; Ridgway et al 2008) along with its Polish version (Tarka and Kukar-Kinney 2020), as well Pathological Buying Screener (Müller et al 2015) and Compulsive Buying Indicator (Raab et al 2005) – both based on German samples; we focused on the scale developed by d’Astous et al (1990)
Our findings suggested that the translated version of the compulsive buying scale (CBS) (d’Astous 1990), that we called Polish-Consumer Buying Scale (P-CBS), was highly reliable and valid in terms of identifying compulsive buyers
Summary
Scholars around the world differ in their methods of understanding compulsive buying behavior as a market phenomenon. Kraepelin (1915) described compulsive buying with the term ‘oniomania’, while Bleuler (1924) referred to it as ‘buying mania’. Individuals often feel guilty about succumbing to their urges and in turn suffer from social and financial harms (see Faber et al 1987; McElroy et al 1994; Manolis and Roberts 2012; Khare 2013). These harms lead to negative consequences in individuals’ lives, such as sizeable consumer debts, broken families, and a generally heightened level of distress (see Dittmar 2005; Lo and Harvey 2011; Baker et al 2016). It was defined as addictive consumption (Elliott 1994; Tomer 2001)
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