Date of Award

2011

Degree Type

Thesis

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Blake, Brian

Subject Headings

Teleshopping -- United States, Electronic commerce -- United States, Consumer behavior -- United States, e-commerce, online shopping, attribute judgments, generalizability, performance, importance, e-tailer, web sites, websites, VISA, books, electronics, Online survey

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the generalizability of attribute performance and attribute importance ratings across product classes. Data were collected, with the use of an online survey, from 313 respondents of which 287 were U.S. college students and 26 were close acquaintances of the research team. Seventy-four percent of respondents were male, all respondents had at least four years of internet use experience, and 44 claim to make at least one online shopping purchase per month. Twenty-six web site attributes were selected from the Variegated Inventory of Site Attributes (VISA) (Blake, Hamilton, Neuendorf & Murcko, 2010) to be rated for attribute performance and attribute importance by respondents in this study. Attribute performance ratings were gathered based on www.Frys.com for the consumer electronic product class and www.Powells.com for the bookstore product class. Also, attribute importance ratings were gathered for the consumer electronic product class, the bookstore product classes, and the general importance domain. An exploratory factor analysis and a series of confirmatory factor analyses were used to identify, confirm, and provide marginal evidence for the generalizability of an underlying four factor, 22 attribute performance structure across the consumer electronic and bookstore product classes. On the other hand, this study failed to identify an underlying attribute importance structure with the use of an exploratory factor analysis. As a result, no structural level assessments of the generalizability of attribute importance ratings could be assessed. Repeated measures MANOVA analyses revealed that the majority of web site features are rated significantly differently across product classes for both performance and importance. ĐŁorrelation analyses demonstrated that the relationship between attribute ratings for the book and consumer electronic product classes tended to be stronger for performance than importance. Also, attribute importance correlations varied across the dom

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