The Impact of Culture on the Family Purchase Decision Process: New Zealand Asian Immigrant and European Families.

Abstract

The research presented in this paper is a step toward addressing the paucity of cross-cultural research in family decision making within the Marketing discipline. This paper examines the influence of New Zealand European children and children from Asian immigrant families in the family purchase decision process. Family interactions of twenty European and Asian families were video-taped during a simulated decision situation. These observations were later content analyzed using the Observed Influence Scale (Lee 1994) by three independents judges. Judges for the European sample were New Zealanders and Chinese judges from Hong Kong and Malaysia were used for the Asian sample. Inter-judge reliability was high for both the European and the Asian sample. There was no significant differences in the influence of the children between the two cultures. However, the study did identify significant differences in gender coalitions for each cultural group. While there were strong father-daughter coalitions in European families, father-son coalitions were more dominant in Asian families. These results and their implications are discussed.