Understanding Chinese consumers’ ethical purchasing decision-making process: A combination of qualitative and quantitative study

Abstract

As with all shopping, there is a wide gap between ethical shopping intention and behavior, and consumers’ ethical shopping processes are very complicated. Through a two-stage study, this paper analyzes those underlying factors that prevent consumers from translating their stated ethical intentions into actual ethical buying behavior. An initial qualitative study uses in-depth interviews with 36 consumers and identifies 6 consumer personal factors and 5 shopping situational factors impeding the transformation of consumers’ stated ethical intentions into actual ethical behavior. In the second stage, a quantitative study uses a large-scale questionnaire, investigating 1200 consumers, to test the adaptability of these personal and situational factors and to investigate their moderating effects on the relationship between ethical intentions and behavior. The findings show that among the personal factors and in addition to ethical consciousness, economic rationality, buying inertia, cynicism, and ethical cognitive efforts all have significant moderating roles on the relationship between ethical intention and action; further, all of the situational factors have moderating effects upon the relationship between intention and action. Finally, the paper provides us with some profound conclusions and insightful implications about how to motivate consumer support for firms’ ethical behavior and how to transfer this type of support into truly positive purchasing behavior.