CHAPTER 1 - University of Exeter

Quantitative Results
Results and Discussion
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Chapter 3 – The Shopping Experience
The responses to the ‘sentence completion’ task at the beginning of the questionnaire
were coded in terms of positive and negative comments. Inter-rater reliability for two
independent raters (Miles & Huberman, 1994) was 82%. The proportions of positive
responses differed by gender. Women gave significantly more positive responses (M
= 1.68) than did the men (M = 1.0) t(96) = 2.50, p = 0.01.
Analysis also revealed a main effect for gender on ratings of enjoyment of shopping
F(1,96) = 4.14, p = 0.04, with women reporting significantly higher enjoyment (M =
4.324) than the men (M = 3.519). These results support the general notion of past
research that women seem to view shopping more as a leisure type activity than do
men (Campbell, 1997), as the female participants here indicated to enjoy shopping
significantly more than men.
Qualitative results
This section of the discussion is divided into two parts; part one focuses on
participants’ best and worst shopping experiences, and part two discusses their ideal
shopping experiences. Male and female descriptions of best and worst shopping
experiences resulted in the development of very similar themes; unless otherwise
noted, therefore, each theme reflects the views of both men and women. The analysis
of participants’ accounts of their past shopping experiences yielded three overall
themes: shopping under pressure, service quality and personnel and internal factors,
while the analysis of participants’ ideal shopping experiences led to the development
of one theme: Needs vs. Wants.