On the Relationships between Socio-economic Characteristics of Consumers and Their Shopping Behavior

Abstract

Although a number of studies have been made on consumer shopping behavior, they can be divided into two basic groups. One of the groups has primarily investigated the formation of trade areas from the viewpoint of consumers, and sought to construct new postulates which modified previous ones on consumer shopping behavior based on central place theory. Another group, not immediately linked to central place theory, attempts to make clear the nature of consumer shopping behavior itself, and to examine the influence on consumers of the socio-economic characteristics of individuals of households as consumers, and the changing commercial environments of the region concerned.This study, taking the viewpoint of the second group, aims to clarify quantitatively the relationships between several socio-economic characteristics of households and their shopping behavior. Kukisaki-mura in Ibaraki prefecture was selected as the study area (Fig. 1).To obtain data on consumer shopping behavior, a questionnaire was carried out at Kukisaki junior high school. The households who had second grade students in the school in the municipality were selected as the sample of the study. The number of questionnaire sheets were 275 and the number recovered were 182. This number corresponded to 3.9% of the total number of households in Kukisaki-mura.The contents of the questionnaire were composed of two parts; the characteristics of households and their shopping behavior. Five variables (year of inflow, pre-address, the occupation and workplace of household head, and the number of cars owned) were selected as indices showing the characteristics of households. The items on shopping behavior included the name of store and its place name to which consumers usually journeyed to purchase the eight goods listed below: bread, meat, and liquor as lower order goods, electric appliances and underwear as middle order goods, and furniture, clothes, and gifts as higher order goods.The study considered consumer shopping behavior, mainly focusing on where consumers chose to buy specific goods, and measured the size of relationships between the characteristics of individual households and their shopping behavior, by using Hayashi's Quantification Theory-II.Table 2 shows the frequency of the use of transportation for purchasing eight goods. Although the percentage of‘car only’showed high rates for all goods, high rates also appeared for ‘on foot’ and‘by bicycle’ for lower order goods and ‘by train’ for higher order goods.Table 5 shows the distance of shopping trips by goods. The greater both average and standard deviations of shopping distances were, the higher the order of shopping goods was. It was also confirmed that the greater the variation of shopping trips, the lower the order of goods.Then, Hayashi's Quantification Theory-II was applied to these data to examine the relationships between shopping behavior and household characteristics. Table 6 and Table 7 present correlation ratios and partial correlation coefficients for explained variables (characteristics of households) by each good. Although correlation rations showed high scores in both 1st and 2nd root for clothes, furniture, and gifts, they were small for other goods. The results indicated a general tendency that the higher the order of shopping goods, the stronger the relationships between shopping behavior and household's characteristics. The relationships between household characteristics and their shopping behavior, however, were not explained by single characteristics such as the year of inflow, but by intricate relationships among several characteristics. This was obvious because there were no characteristics with high partial correlation coefficients for all goods.In detail, the relationships between consumer shopping behavior and household characteristics were weak for lower order goods such as bread and meat etc.