Aimee Drolet

Do We Really Need Multiple-Item Measures in Service Research?

Increasingly, marketing academics advocate the use of multiple-item measures. However, use of multiple-item measures is costly, especially for service researchers. This article investigates the incremental information of each additional item in a multiple-item scale. By applying a framework derived from the forecasting literature on correlated experts, the authors show that, even with very modest error term correlations between items, the incremental information from each additional item is extremely small. This study’s “information” (as opposed to “reliability”) approach indicates that even the second or third item contributes little to the information obtained from the first item. Furthermore, the authors present evidence that added items actually aggravate respondent behavior, inflating across-item error term correlation and undermining respondent reliability. Researchers may want to consider the issue of item information in addition to reliability. This article discusses ways in which researchers can construct scales that maximize the amount of information scale items offer without compromising measurement reliability.

Consumer Control and Empowerment: A Primer

This paper introduces consumer empowerment as a promising research area. Going beyond lay wisdom that more control is always better, we outline several hypotheses concerning (a) the factors that influence the perception of empowerment, and (b) the consequences of greater control and the subjective experience of empowerment on consumer satisfaction and confidence.

Choice and Self-Expression: A Cultural Analysis of Variety-Seeking

Three studies examined whether the tendency to seek variety in choices depends in part on cultural assumptions of choice and uniqueness. Study 1 showed that people from different cultures where different assumptions of choice and uniqueness dominate show different levels of variety in their choice rule use. Study 2 primed participants with magazine ads highlighting different representations of uniqueness dominant in individualist versus collectivist cultures to show the influence of cultural meanings of uniqueness on the variety-seeking tendency. Study 3 manipulated the motivation to display variety to demonstrate that variety-seeking in the United States partly hinges on cultural meanings of choice as self-expression. Variety-seeking in choice rule use was eliminated when participants had the chance to self-express through choice listing. The research illustrates the role of cultural assumptions in the variety-seeking tendency.

Age-Related Differences in Responses to Emotional Advertisements

This research investigated motivational influences associated with age on responses to emotional advertisements. Experiment 1 showed increased liking and recall of emotional ads among older consumers and that time horizon perspective moderates these age-related differences. Experiment 2 revealed influences of age and time horizon perspective on responses to different types of emotional ads. Ads focusing on avoiding negative emotions were liked and recalled more among older consumers and among young consumers made to have a limited time horizon perspective. This research illustrates the importance of considering age-related differences in information processing due to motivational as well as to cognitive changes.

How Do People Adhere to Goals When Willpower Is Low? The Profits (and Pitfalls) of Strong Habits

Across 5 studies, we tested whether habits can improve (as well as derail) goal pursuit when people have limited willpower. Habits are repeated responses automatically triggered by cues in the performance context. Because the impetus for responding is outsourced to contextual cues, habit performance does not depend on the finite self-control resources required for more deliberative actions. When these resources are limited, people are unable to deliberatively choose or inhibit responses, and they become locked into repeating their habits. Thus, depletion increases habit performance. Furthermore, because the habit-cuing mechanism is blind to peoples current goals, depletion should boost the performance of both desirable and undesirable habits. This habit boost effect emerged consistently across experiments in the field (Studies 1-2) and in the laboratory (Studies 3-4), as well as in a correlational study using a trait measure of self-control (Study 5). Given that many of peoples habits in daily life are congruent with their goals, habit processes can improve goal adherence when self-control is low.

Recalling Mixed Emotions

In two longitudinal experiments, conducted both in the field and lab, we investigated the recollection of mixed emotions. Results demonstrated that the intensity of mixed emotions is generally underestimated at the time of recall-an effect that increases over time and does not occur to the same degree with unipolar emotions. Of note, the decline in memory of mixed emotions is distinct from the pattern found for memory of negative emotions, implying that the recall bias is diagnostic of the complexity of mixed emotions rather than of any association with negative affect. Finally, the memory decay effect was driven by the felt conflict aroused by the experience of mixed emotions. (c) 2008 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

Off-Target? Changing Cognitive-Based Attitudes

Researchers argue that the effectiveness of cognitive versus affective persuasive appeals depends in part on whether the appeal is congruent or incongruent with a primarily cognitive or affective attitude base. However, considerable research suggests these persuasion effects may hold only for predominantly effective attitudes and not cognitive attitudes. Indeed, results of Experiment 1 show that the relative effectiveness of congruent relative to incongruent persuasion appeals holds for brands with predominantly affective associations, but not those with predominately cognitive associations. Experiment 2 explores one reason for this anomalous finding: Cognitive attitudes may be relatively impervious to persuasive appeals because the probability of targeting the specific attribute on which the cognitive attitude is based is smaller. The results are supportive, showing that significant persuasion effects are found when the specific beliefs on which cognitive attitudes are based are taken into account. However, these effects only occur under conditions of low cognitive load and not high cognitive lad where resources for the cognitive processing of the appeals are limited. We discuss the implications of the research for the role of attitude structure is understanding persuasion effects and the interplay of affective and cognitive elements in persuasion processes.

Express Your Social Self: Cultural Differences in Choice of Brand-Name Versus Generic Products

This research examined cultural differences in the patterns of choices that reflect more social characteristics of a chooser (e.g., social status). Four studies examined the cultural difference in individuals’ tendency to choose brand-name products (i.e., high-status options) over generic products (i.e., low-status options) and the underlying reasons for these differences. Compared to European Americans, Asian Americans consistently chose brand-name products. This difference was driven by Asian Americans’ greater social status concerns. Self-consciousness was more strongly associated with the brand-name choices of Asian Americans (vs. European Americans), and experimentally induced social status led Asian Americans (vs. European Americans) to make more choices concordant with self-perception. These findings highlight the importance of considering external and social motivations underlying the choice-making process.

Differing postneonatal mortality rates of African-American and white infants in Chicago: an ecologic study.

Objectives: This study sought to determine whether neighborhood impoverishment explains the racial disparity in urban postneonatal mortality rates. Methods: Stratified and multivariate logistic regression analyses were performed on the vital records of all African-Americans and whites born in Chicago by means of a linked 1992–1995 computerized birth–death file with appended 1990 U.S. census income and 1995 Chicago Department of Public Health data. Four community-level variables (low median family income, high rates of unemployment, homicide, and lead poisoning) were analyzed. Communities with one or more ecologic risk factors were classified as impoverished. Results: The postneonatal mortality rate of African-Americans (N = 104,656) was 7.5/1000 compared to 2.7/1000 for whites (N = 52,954); relative risk (95% confidence interval) equaled 2.8 (2.3–3.3). Seventy-nine percent of African-American infants compared to 9% of white infants resided in impoverished neighborhoods; p < 0.01. In impoverished neighborhoods, the adjusted odds ratio (controlling for infant and maternal individual-level risk factors) of postneonatal mortality for African-American infants equaled 1.5 (0.5–4.2). In nonimpoverished neighborhoods, the adjusted odds ratio of postneonatal mortality for African-American infants equaled 1.8 (1.1–2.9). Conclusions: We conclude that urban African-American infants who reside in nonimpoverished neighborhoods are at high risk for postneonatal mortality.

Consumption Effort: The Mental Cost of Generating Utility and the Role of Consumer Energy Level in Ambitious Consumption

We propose that the essence of consumption is the mental process of generating utility from products, that this process expends consumption effort, and that consumers take consumption effort into account in their decision making. In 2 studies, we tested the hypothesis that consumption preferences become more ambitious—individuals become more inclined to choose challenging-to-consume products—when consumer energy levels are elevated. In Study 1, energy induced by ingesting caffeine increased participants’ tendency to choose subtitled foreign movies rather than domestic remakes of those same movies. Study 2 demonstrated the same effect with naturally occurring energy levels and with consumption experiences whose effortfulness and quality were varied independently. In choosing among sets of poems to read, participants with higher levels of energy exhibited less effort aversion but neither more nor less quality seeking. A reanalysis of Study 1 showed that the energy effect is not simply a case of consumers using more energy when they have more energy, because the energy effect disappeared when participants were made aware of the energy source, suggesting that a preference-correction process occurred. The energy dependence of consumer preferences affords tactical opportunities for marketers, but the welfare implications for consumers are intriguingly unclear, because in both studies we found that energy increased participants’ choice of challenging consumption experiences without increasing their liking of those experiences.