Development of Composite Framework for Studying the Effect of Personality on Impulsive Buying Behaviour of Youth

The present workfocuses on modifying constructs of Impulsive Buying and Personality and Buying Tendencies for specific products among youth at large. It proposes a relook at the itemization adopted in earlier developed scales in the subject of impulsive buying like the Verplanken and Herabadi (2001) Scale, Bosnjak, Bandl&Bratko (2007), and identifying Personality with special reference to young consumers in the age group of Early Adulthood, Young and Middle Adulthood and Matured Adulthood. Based on the results of Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), some of the dimensions used in previous Personality Frameworks have been retained while as few emerging constructs were adopted for their relevance to consumer behavior. Emotional Stability and Conscientiousness were left unchanged, whereas Extraversion, Agreeableness and Openness were transformed to new constructs for their foundation in organizational behavior and relevance of newly adopted constructs in consumer behaviour. One more emerging construct “Conserving Propensity” was appended to personality framework with higher relevance. Furthermore, some of the determinants of impulsive buying explored by early researchers were also retained while as some of the emerging constructs/factors were added based on results of the Exploratory Factor Analysis.

The number of studies used for studying the association between Personality, Impulsive buying and Buying tendency for the specific product has increased in recent years. While the rigor applied to the questionnaire development process may be improving, there still emerges need to make use of sophisticated procedures to determine the realistic reliability and validity of the instrument and the type of relation between the constructs. This paper explores the process for how a highly coherent and comprehensive items with the help of EFA have been appended to Personality Affection Cognition and Buying Tendencies (PACBTS) framework

The research design is exploratory in nature that helped the researcher in identifying the items falling in the particular instrument. EFA was applied for identifying items and constructs.

The data was collected through structured questionnaire from young consumers being part of higher educational institutes in various Universities and Colleges across Jammu and Kashmir. Collected data was analyzed through SPSS.

Factor analysis was performed on 90 items separately on Personality, Impulsiveness and Buying Tendency and 15 factors were produced by Principal Component Analysis. After reviewing the underlying 15 factors, the items of Impulsiveness produced eight factors. One factor had loadings lower than in other factors, so it was not taken for further analysis and hence impulsiveness produced only seven evocative factors. Furthermore, personality items generated 6 factors and were given different themes which has been elaborated comprehensively in following sections. In addition, the observed items of buying tendencies were factor reduced to 1 underlying construct.

In order to pursue the guidelines of the journal, comprehensive process of Structure Equation Modeling prerequisite for reliability and validity measures could not be discussed in the current paper and would be taken in future endeavors