CHAPTER 1 - University of Exeter

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Chapter 2 - Methods
shopping activities which came to mind most readily. Asking about both types of
shopping and shopping activities was important at this stage, as this gives a fuller
picture of what types of activities are involved in the process of shopping as well as
of the different types of shopping. This was done because most typical items should
be recalled sooner than less typical items, and this way we would get a better picture
of what participants actually think shopping is. Later on, in Study 5 we used a more
in-depth item generation and card-sorting task to elicit participants’ views about the
concept of shopping. The way different things are construed can help understand
how people view the world. Study 4 utilised this fact to gain a better understanding
of how participants comprehend what shopping means to them. Other studies that
have assessed the ways people construe different concepts have used similar methods
to generate items (Dube & Bel, 2003; Fehr, 1994; Fehr and Russell, 1994). The
reason that participants were asked to participate in the item generation task was to
ensure that we did not overlook anything which could be seen by this population as
being a part of shopping, and also to reduce researcher bias in selection of the
exemplars to be used for the card-sorting task. Tversky (1977) noted that similarity is
one of the ways humans make sense of the world; therefore using this card-sorting
task would help us understand more about how both men and women view the
concept of shopping.
The studies in Chapter 5 highlighted subtle differences in how men and
women conceptualised shopping, but there was no indication of the source of such.
Thus, Chapter 6 concludes this thesis with another qualitative investigation. For this
purpose a focus group study was set up, to investigate in more detail where these
differences within the concept of shopping are between men and women. Three
groups of participants (one all female, one mixed and one all make) took part in this