Methodologies for Studying Consumer Culture

The range of research methods for studying consumption and consumer culture is diverse and reflects the array of methods that are available generally to researchers in the cultural, psychological, and social sciences. Principally, there are two methodological poles that can be identified in studies of consumer culture. First, we can observe researchers using methods reflecting positivist approaches based mainly on quantitative methods, including survey analysis, experimental designs, biophysical measurement, and cognitive testing. Along different lines, we can see researchers employing qualitative and interpretive methods based on interviews, ethnographic and participatory methods, material and object-based approaches, and semiotics.

The field of consumption studies is one where various disciplines from the social, psychological, and economic sciences meet to form a conglomerate field. By no means is there a consensus within this field about research topics and questions. The questions asked by researchers and the methods they use tend to reflect the norms, innovations, and methodological debates occurring more generally within each discipline. Furthermore, much like wider consumer culture, the methods researchers use to study consumer culture are themselves subject to trends, fashions, and ongoing innovations. For example, we might refer to the “postmodern turn” in methods of the 1980s and 1990s, in contrast to the era of unbridled positivism, which directed much of the twentieth century's social and economic research, or indeed a series of turns in the last few decades that can broadly be described as postpositivist and involving niche methods inspired by narrative studies, semiotic and visual approaches, practice studies, or materiality studies. The disciplinary affiliations of consumer researchers have a large degree of impact on the predominant methods they are likely to employ. Although it is a pattern that is changing to some degree, it is mostly the case that economic and psychological research approaches tend to employ positivist and quantitative methods whereas the tradition in sociological and cultural research tends to be oriented to more interpretive and qualitative methods.

There are some obvious pros and cons associated with the range of research approaches used in the field of consumer research. The diversity of methodological traditions is valuable in circulating a multiplicity of data collection approaches, asking a range of research questions and providing information on diverse aspects of consumer culture that can be accessed only through the different frameworks of these disciplines. However, on the other hand, it can lead to a bewildering diversity of findings, informed by completely different methodological assumptions, each illustrating only a tiny or limited aspect of consumer culture. Researchers at each of the methodological poles pay little attention to each other's work. This massive diversity is based on the fact that studies of consumer culture themselves have assorted disciplinary bases as their vantage point, each having their own historically consolidated preferences for favored methods, which are often not used just out of convenience or usefulness but in fact are elemental to the very epistemological constitution of their disciplines and subsequently the worldview of researchers themselves. Thus, economics and psychology were the powerhouse disciplines for consumer research throughout much of the twentieth century's latter half. With an emphasis on cognitive analyses of consumer behavior, cost-benefit analysis, and consumer decision-making processes, they were seen as offering a natural home for studies of consumers and consumption. However, starting in the 1970s and becoming even more significant in the subsequent decades, researchers in anthropology, sociology, fashion and design studies, and media and communication studies came to greater prominence. The field of consumption studies was greatly invigorated by this diversity and this also helped to consolidate consumption studies as a pandisciplinary field of inquiry. These recent approaches have used mostly qualitative and interpretive approaches, which, combined with innovative theoretical and conceptual frameworks, have shed a different light on consumer practices.

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