CHAPTER 1 - University of Exeter

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Chapter 1 - Introduction
social divisions such as those of gender or class…” (p. 1). This led to the conception
of the current programme of research, which aims to answer the following main
question: Is shopping still a gender-based activity in the 21 st century? The series of
studies investigating this question from a variety of angles will be presented in
Chapters 3 through 6. First, however, the relevant research literature will be reviewed
to provide the context for what follows.
Previous research
Much of the earlier research within the consumer affairs domain (from about
the 1950s to the 1980s) focused on either segmenting consumers into groups based
on their shopping preferences, the so-called shopper typologies (Darden & Ashton,
1975; Lesser & Hughes, 1986; and Stone, 1954 amongst others), or on gender
differences with regard to shopping behaviour (Campbell, 1997; Lunt & Livingstone,
1992; Miller, 1998 amongst others). Some researchers investigated how experiential
factors and motivation play into this (Hirschman & Holbrook, 1982; Tauber, 1972),
whilst others focused on the processes of consumer decision-making (Sproles &
Kendall, 1986) and other aspects of economic behaviour. It needs to be noted that
there is a very broad spectrum of types of shopping ranging from the routine of food
shopping to buying a car or a house with many different types of shopping in
between. These different types of shopping can be appealing to both men and women
within their different roles as well as be appropriate at different stages in the life
cycle. Because the spectrum of different types of shopping is so large, there needs to
be a focus for the present programme of research. Thus, the focus of this thesis is on
leisure shopping. This was decided because it is a type of shopping that both sexes
engage in and as such might give more insight into how men and women think about