No such thing as a green consumer?

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The Purchase Process Model

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Research Methods

All of the data for this project have been collected through qualitative research methods.

We have completed a programme of 81 in-depth, semi-structured interviews mainly in the Leeds area (UK) with self-selecting green or ethical consumers between April 2004 and April 2005. This number enabled us to achieve theoretical saturation in our target group (Gummesson, 1991). Our recruitment strategy included a mix of ages, genders and socio-economic groups across the sample, encompassing a range of consumers. A variety of sources was used in order to make sure that consumers concerned with as many different aspects of sustainable consumption as possible were represented in the research:

• Members of organic box schemes in the Leeds area.
• Posters and leaflets in wholefood, fairtrade, organic and charity shops in the Leeds area.
• Members of the Leeds area Friends of the Earth group.
• An advert in the newsletter of the UK Quakers sustainability self-help group.
• Posters, leaflets and emails to Buddhist centres in the UK.
• News item in the Ethical Consumer magazine.
• News item in the Pure magazine.

Further interviewees were recruited using the snowballing technique from initial contacts.

Although we deliberately approached green consumers, we did not make our interest in environmental purchase criteria explicit prior to the third phase of the interview (see below).

The interviews were designed in three parts:

In the first phase, in line with critical incident techniques (Easterby-Smith et al, 2002), interviewees were asked to supply some examples of recent purchases (or non purchases) of technology-based products. Products discussed included a wide range of white goods (cookers, fridges, freezers, dishwashers, washing machines etc) and grey goods (televisions, stereos, computers etc) as well as cars, low energy light bulbs and green energy tariffs.

In the second phase of the interview, participants were asked to describe in detail their purchase decisions for two or three of the items that they had identified in phase one. We asked them to tell us about their purchase processes from the first inclination to research or purchase, through to reflections on their post-purchase experiences, including disposal where applicable. We also encouraged them to talk about the lifestyle contexts of their purchases (such as moving house, having children or a busy job) in order to understand their reasons for beginning the purchase process.

In the final phase of the interview, we asked participants to tell us about their other purchase habits, including their routines for purchasing food and household products. In this section, we explicitly instigated discussion about green and ethical purchase criteria if these had not come up in the course of the interview. In both of the latter phases we used laddering techniques in order to aid the elicitation of the necessary level of detail (Reynolds and Gutman, 1988).

We analysed the data using a mixture of cognitive mapping (McDonald, Daniels and Harris, 2004) and more traditional, inductive, qualitative analysis techniques. It was through the inductive data analysis that the decision-making models and the typology of green consumers were surfaced. We then returned to the primary data and used the sustainable purchase process model to analyse each one of the 130 purchases in our data set. The typology that was developed from the data was further refined using focus groups, which involved an additional 11 consumers.

References

Easterby-Smith, M., Thorpe, R., Lowe, A. (2002) Management Research: An Introduction, 2nd Edition, Sage: London.

Gummesson, E. (1991) Qualitative Methods in Management Research. Sage: Thousand Oaks.

McDonald S., Daniels, K., Harris, C. (2004) Mapping Methods for Organisational Research. In C. Cassell and G. Symon (eds) Essential Guidebook for Qualitative Research Methods. Sage:London.

Reynolds T.J., Gutman J. (1988) Laddering theory, method, analysis, and interpretation. Journal of Advertising Research 28 (1): 11-31.