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Profiling consumers' decision-making styles has been the focus of a multitude of consumer interest studies (e.g., Bettman 1979; Sproles 1985; Thorelli, Becker, and Engeldow 1975; Westbrook and Black 1985). Consumer affairs specialists use such profiles to understand consumers' shopping behavior, while advertisers and marketing researchers use them to segment the consumers into various niches for product positioning. Until this point, most of the empirical research investigating consumer styles used U.S. samples for developing and validating the measuring instrument. However, such research may be inapplicable to other cultures, unless cross-cultural psychometric properties of the measures (i.e., dimensionality and reliability) are shown to exist (Douglas and Craig 1983; Hui and Triandis 1985). Further, if the psychometric properties of the measures of consumer decision-making styles vary widely across countries, conclusions based on the scale may actually be attributed to measure unreliability (Green and White 1976; Parameswaran and Yaprak 1987). As a result, evidence of the generalizability of consumer styles research and related instruments to other cultures is needed.
Therefore, this study examines the cross-cultural applicability of a scale for profiling consumers' decision-making styles. The study is consistent with the stream of research that addresses the cross-cultural generalizability of consumer behavior measurement scales and procedures (see Netemeyer, Durvasula, and Lichtenstein 1991).
CONSUMERS' DECISION-MAKING STYLES
Decision-making style refers to a mental orientation describing how a consumer makes choices. Extant research in this field has identified three approaches to characterize consumer styles: (a) The Consumer Typology Approach (Darden and Ashton 1974; Moschis 1976); (b) The Psychographics/Lifestyles Approach (Lastovicka 1982; Wells 1974); and (c) The Consumer Characteristics Approach (Sproles 1985; Sproles and Kendall 1986; Sproles and Sproles 1990). Integral to all these approaches is the theme that despite an element of individuality in consumers' behavior, all consumers approach shopping with certain basic decision-making styles such as rational shopping, impulsiveness, and quality consciousness.
The Consumer Characteristics Approach, however, is one of the most promising as it deals with the mental orientation of consumers in making decisions and, therefore, focuses on the cognitive and affective orientations in consumer decision-making. It is valuable to consumer affairs specialists because it provides a measurement system for standardized testing of consumer decision-making styles for practical applications such as counseling consumers.
The genesis of this approach was based on...