Household Consumption Patterns

At the core of household consumption patterns is the interrelation between scale and composition of the household, income, savings, expenses, and enculturation patterns.

There are many psychological factors that influence the household consumption sensibility—from the willingness to achieve and/or reproduce a specific social status, to demonstrating material culture in a competition between neighbors who have to have more and better. A series of oppositions (e.g., wealth–poverty, urban–rural, small family–big family,) represent extremes of household structural characteristics and of the character of consumption. Additionally, the specific historical and regional processes of education, enculturation, and socialization influence household decision makers as to what to consume. The transforming of American culture from a culture of consuming toward a culture of sustainability and caring redirects the evolution of household consumption patterns. However, the gradual cultural reproduction of endless wants has resulted in the emergence of forms of compulsive buying that may relate to an impulse-control disorder that was documented as long ago as the early 20th century.

The household is an elementary social unit and includes common expenses and individual expenses. The typology of households includes single member, childless households (including married and nonmarried partners), two generations (parents or grandparents and children), three generations (parents, grandparents, and children) and others.

Housing, nutrition, and clothing belong to the general common consumption pattern. Heating, cooking, lighting, cooling, and water supply have also been described as primary household consumptions (operations). Telephone, laundry, and dry cleaning services and supplies, babysitting, maid services, holiday decorations, and others belong to secondary household consumptions. They vary by household, although the main confounding factor is the number of children. Health, mobility, and recreation are among individual specific consumption patterns.

Households affect both the structure of consumption and the environment through their day-to-day decisions on what to buy and how they use goods and services, where to live and work, what kind of dwelling to have, how to manage their waste, and where to go on vacation.