Xenocentrism and status, are they related to explain consumption?

• Autor(a) principal: Gamarra, Ana Carolina de Morais
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da ESPM
• Texto Completo: http://tede2.espm.br/handle/tede/698
• topic: consumer behavior; conspicuous consumption; status; xenocentrism; CIENCIAS SOCIAIS APLICADAS::COMUNICACAO

Consumption is a powerful social tool, once by means of a person’s goods it is possible to have a glimpse of who she is, where she comes from and her lifestyle, which tends to pave the way for her to join a determined circle. Besides that, through purchase, people are led to believe they have the ability of becoming their ideal self. Consequently, conspicuous consumption occurs with the aim of resembling or differentiating from a group or even to compensate insecurities. However, aspects regarding culture are directly associated to consumption behavior, once each culture has its own perspective about symbols. Therefore, many aspects besides a product’s intrinsic characteristic influence consumption, for instance, status, xenocentrism, income, social class and sex. The main purpose of this paper is to understand if xenocentrism influences the quest for status. Besides that, the study will also investigate if other constructs, such as, income, social class and sex enhance the status-seek. For the sake of achieving these goals, a quantitative approach was adopted, using the C-XENSCALE and the Status Scale to measure the constructs through an online survey. Firstly, data were explored regarding the likelihood of missing data, presence of multicollinearity (VIF – variance inflation factor) and existence of multivariate outliers. No VIF value above the restraint of 5 was found; no item registered an elevated level of ulticollinearity; no outlier was excluded from the sample. With the previous assessments done, several techniques were applied, such as, a Multiple Linear Regression, a Decision Tree, a Latent Class Analysis and a MANOVA. As a result, evidence was found that indicate that the seek for status is highly influenced by xenocentrism; income also influences status-seek, but in a smaller degree; there are levels of xenocentrism, and they influence the quest for status differently; neither social class nor sex impact the quest for status.