SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Business Administration
No 2005:5:
Lifestyles and consumer behavior
Lennart Sjöberg ()
and Elisabeth Engelberg
Abstract: In this article, the concept of lifestyle is traced to its
early roots in personality psychology and in marketing. In the latter
field, many commercial marketing firms have made strong claims as to the
explanatory power of lifestyle dimensions, often based on procedures which
have been kept secret, but researchers have seldom been able to verify such
claims. In spite of this, the approach is very popular, has wide
credibility and is often given very favorable media coverage. Probably
because of this, it is often considered as a very important and promising
approach by administrators working with the regulation of risk and risk
communication. It may also be credible in some quarters because it affords
a way of ‘explaining’ risk perception as being non-rational. In this paper,
we give results from an empirical study of nuclear waste risk perception
which is related to a basic risk perception model and three approaches to
lifestyles: Kahle’s List of Values, a Swedish adaptation of the
‘Agorame´trie’ approach suggested by a group of French researchers, and
Dake and Wildavsky’s Cultural Theory dimensions. It was found that nuclear
waste risk perception could be modeled successfully with risk attitudes and
perception data (basic model about 65% of the variance explained), but that
lifestyle dimensions added virtually nothing to the explanatory power of
the model.
Keywords: consumer behavior; lifestyle; risk; (follow links to similar papers)
34 pages, April 20, 2005
Before downloading any of the electronic versions below
you should read our statement on
copyright.
Download GhostScript
for viewing Postscript files and the
Acrobat Reader for viewing and printing pdf files.
Full text versions of the paper:
hastba2005_005.pdf 
(213kB)
Download Statistics
- This paper is published as:
-
Sjöberg, Lennart and Elisabeth Engelberg, (2005), 'Lifestyles, consumer behavior and risk perception', International Review of Sociology - Revue Internationale de Sociologie, Vol. 15, No. 2, pages 327-362
Questions (including download problems) about the papers in this series should be directed to Helena Lundin ()
Report other problems with accessing this service to Sune Karlsson ()
or Helena Lundin ().
Programing by
Design by Joakim Ekebom
