To celebrate its 40th anniversary the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) is publishing a couple of articles that look at what consumer behavior researchers study. The first is by Justine Rapp and Ronald Paul Hill which considers who do consumer researchers study? The second is by a team I was part of. More of which in the next post.
Coding 40 Years Of JCR
Rapp and Hill (2015) downloaded and coded all articles in JCR’s first forty calendar years. (Clearly, this must have been a lot of work. Still, hopefully, it was interesting to read the nearly 2,000 academic articles published in the journal). After coding all the papers they are able to show the broad areas of research in the journal, the methods used, and where in the world the studies were conducted.
Who Do Consumer Researchers Study?
It is perhaps not surprising but the vast bulk of the studies have been done in very high Human Development countries. This is the “rich” element of the WEIRD acronym — Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. This acronym is used to describe the people studied in most psychological work. This points to a potential problem. Are the subjects studied representative of the world’s population? I feel it would be a mistake to damn research because of this. You can still learn a lot from WEIRD subjects. That said it does point to an area where the field can improve. Namely our understanding of non-WEIRD consumers.
Student Subjects And Research
Rapp and Hill note the rise in manipulation-based experimental work, e.g., psychological tests run in a laboratory. This is now the dominant approach in the field. A related rise is the increase of student subjects. Manipulation-based experiments and student subjects go together like a puppy and toilet training. If you have one it just makes sense to consider the other.
This leads to the concern that nearly all research is done on a small fraction of the WEIRD population, students. WERID people are in turn only a small fraction of the world population. Rapp and Hill have a slightly hopeful view of this problem from the “increased use of multiple sample types within each article across the entire dataset.” (Rapp and Hill, 2015)
It is always helpful to better understand what researchers do so anyone interested in consumer research could benefit from reading Rapp and Hill.
For more on understanding people from different cultures see here, here, and here.
Read: Justine M. Rapp and Ronald Paul Hill (2015) “Lordy, Lordy Look Who’s Forty!” The Journal of Consumer Research Reaches A Milestone, The Journal of Consumer Research, June,