Proceedings of the 17th International Academic Conference, Vienna

THE ROLE OF THE CONSUMER DEMOGRAPHICS ON THEIR PRICE PERCEPTIONS WHEN PURCHASING SHOPPING GOODS- A STUDY FROM ESKISEHIR, TURKEY

CELIL KOPARAL, NURI CALIK

Abstract:

This surveys intends to find out how consumer demographics affect their price perceptions in their purchases of shopping goods. A survey is applied to 219 respondents selected via stratified sampling from Eskişehir, a city of Turkey with 700.000 inhabitants. The respondents are required to answer 45 questions of which last five are related to demographic characteristics of these respondents. The rest 40 are statements which are designed to reflect the price perceptions of these people. The study consists of five parts. The first part is an introduction where the scope and the purpose of the study are concisely stated. The second part relates to the theoretical background of the subject matter and the prior researches carried out so far. The third part deals with research methodology, basic premises and hypotheses attached to these premises. Research model and analyses take place in this section. Theoretical framework is built and a variable name is assigned to each of the question asked or proposition forwarded to the respondents of this survey. 40 statements or propositions given to the respondents are placed on a five-point Likert scale where 1 represents strongly disagree; 2 disagree; 3 neither agree nor disagree; 4 agree and 5 strongly agree. The last five questions about demographic traits as age, gender, occupation, educational level and monthly income are placed either on a nominal or ratio scale with respect to the nature of the trait. Ten research hypotheses are formulated in this section. The fourth part mainly deals with the results of the hypothesis tests and a factor analysis is applied to the data on hand. Here exploratory factor analysis reduces 40 variables to six basic components as “value consciousness, price consciousness, coupon and sales proneness, price mavenism, price-quality relationship, and prestige sensitivity.. KMO test of sampling adequacy and scale reliability test proved high scores as 0.9261 and 0.946 respectively. In addition non-parametric biraviate analysis in terms of Chi-Square test is applied to test the hypotheses formulated in this respect. The fifth part is the conclusion where findings of this survey is listed.

Keywords: Value consciousness, price consciousness, coupon and sales proneness, price mavenism, price-quality relationship, prestige sensitivity

DOI: 10.20472/IAC.2015.017.046

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