Impulse Buying: Who, How, and Why We do It
Alternative Title
Abstract
My topic of study is on the phenomenon of impulse buying, more commonly known as retail therapy. I have focused mostly on online purchases as it is what is most accessible to the demographic I have available to me, but I have also looked at in-store purchases as well. The question I am looking to answer in this study is why college students participate in impulse buying, and what outside variables, like stress, contribute to this behavior. My goal for this research is to get a better insight of how our setting and emotional state affects the way we spend money as college students. Particularly because money is something college students notoriously lack yet spend a lot of. Having a better understanding of why we do certain things will give us insight into how we may prevent these negative behaviors that are not beneficial to ourselves by correcting the root of the issue. Participants completed several questionnaires for this study. These included researched and approved measures for personality traits, financial anxiety, trait impulsiveness, and a college student stress scale. This will be a correlational study and I will be analyzing the data in correspondence with that information. As this study is not yet completed, I will be discussing my expected findings. I expect to find that students with higher general anxiety and stress will participate in impulse buying more than students who do not have as much trait anxiety or stress. However, I believe that students who have more financial anxiety may tend to spend less money on unnecessary and impulsive purchases. I also expect to find that students who have higher impulsiveness tendencies will tend to participate in impulse buying more than those with lower impulsiveness scores.