COMPULSIVE BUYING AND RELATED MOTIVES: ENHANCEMENT AND COPING

"Background: Research indicates that compulsive buying that refers to chronic, excessive shopping and expenditure isn’t rare, especially among the young people. However, related studies are limited. More research is required to advance our understanding about the phenomenon and to improve prevention and treatment strategies. Objectives: This study especially aimed to investigate the role of shopping motives for compulsive buying. For this purpose, coping and enhancement motives that were originally developed to assess drinking reasons were adapted for shopping. Examining the relationships of compulsive buying with demographics, spending frequency of different products, positive and negative affect were also other objectives of the study. Methods: The sample was composed of 362 voluntary university students selected through convenience sampling in Turkey. Majority of the participants were females (77.9%). The mean age was 21.91 (SD = 3.11). Participants rated the frequency of shopping motives for each of the 5 enhancement items (e.g. to get high, because it’s fun) and the 5 coping items (e.g. to forget worries, to relax) on 4 point Likert-scale (1: almost never, 4: almost always). Compulsive Buying Scale, Positive and Negative Affect Schedule were also utilized as standard measurement instruments. The participants rated their spending frequency on different products such as cosmetics, clothes, technological products, or furniture on a 1 to 4 scale (1: almost never, 4: almost always). Findings: According to the results of the hierarchical multiple regression analysis being female, having younger age and lower GPA (1st step) in addition to higher personal income (2nd step), spending frequently for cosmetics, shoes and clothes (3rd step), having higher negative affect (4th step) were found to be associated with compulsive buying scores. Moreover, both enhancement and coping motives that were entered into the regression equation in the last step (5th step), also predicted the participants’ compulsive buying scores. The total explained variance was 58.2%. Conclusions: The findings of this study are important to indicate the possible risk factors for compulsive buying including age, gender, income, spending habits, and negative affect. Moreover, the results reveal that buying something in order to enhance positive affect and to avoid negative feelings can be prominent determinants of compulsive buying. Research from non-Western countries such as the present study are essentially important to highlight the associates of compulsive buying across cultures since majority of the relevant literature derive from studies conducted with Western participants."