CHAPTER 1 - University of Exeter

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Chapter 2 - Methods
negative thoughts and feelings about shopping, which in turn may help explain why
men and women engage or not engage in shopping behaviours. To do this a short
open-ended qualitative survey was designed with two parts. Part one asked
participants to fill in a sentence completion task, and in part two participants were
asked to give detailed accounts of their past (bad and good) shopping experiences as
well as describing what an ideal shopping experience would be like for them.
Malterud (2001) argued that qualitative research is most often used when meanings
of social phenomena, as they are experienced by individuals themselves, are the
focus of investigation, which is the reason this qualitative approach was employed in
this instance. Similarly, Ashworth (2003) also pointed out that the majority of
psychological researchers who want to investigate people’s experiences of a given
social phenomenon are more inclined now to use qualitative rather than quantitative
approaches. The reason for this is that qualitative methods have the advantage of
yielding rich descriptive accounts in participants’ own words of a specific
phenomenon under investigation (Geertz, 1973). This rich and detailed description in
participants’ own words was precisely what was necessary to gain a good initial
understanding about how both men and women viewed their past shopping
experiences, to highlight potential gender differences. The combination of using the
sentence completion task and getting participants to write about their past shopping
experience gave us a much better idea of how positively or negatively men and
women viewed shopping activities. Having participants’ own accounts and thoughts
and feelings about shopping has helped identify positive and negative feelings both
men and women might have about shopping, and at the same time highlighted these
much more than a quantitative survey might have done at this stage. Because in a
quantitative survey participants would be limited to the concepts and understanding