Compulsive buying: Review and relevance to consumer debt management

Scope and method of study. The purpose of this study was to identify a basic set of personality variables that would explain consumer tendencies toward compulsive buying behavior. Participants in the study were 245 individuals attending the first of a series of seminars meant to educate consumers about the Consumer Credit Counseling Service (CCCS) of Central Oklahoma. Each participant completed a consumer needs survey measuring components of Mowen's (2000) 3M Model of Personality and Motivation, as well as measures of compulsive buying tendencies and impulsiveness. Data were then matched with demographic and financial information from the CCCS database. A hierarchical regression analysis was conducted to describe compulsive buying in terms of a robust set of behavioral traits. Logistic regression was then used to determine which demographic and psychographic variables best explained whether consumers would enter consumer credit counseling following an initial screening session.;Findings and conclusions. Study 1 showed that Mowen's (2000) 3M Model accounted for 27.2% of the variance in compulsive buying, more than twice the variance explained by the five factors of extraversion, agreeableness, emotional stability, conscientiousness, and originality alone. Major conclusions from the analysis were that compulsive buyers are significantly more materialistic, extraverted, emotionally unstable, and agreeable than other consumers, and that the 3M provides a more powerful and extensible framework for examining consumers' behavior traits than does the five factor model. Study 2 showed that of all variables in the study, only a self-reported measure of commitment to the CCCS program and number of months necessary to pay off CCCS debt were predictive of whether consumers entered debt counseling following an initial interview. Overall, the 3M model is shown to provide a strong framework for explaining the psychological and motivational components of compulsive buying behavior as well as having potential for increasing researchers' understanding of other consumer behaviors.