Spousal roles, conflict resolution strategies and life-cycle effects in family consumer decision-making: a study of Saudi husbands

Submission note: A thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Business School, Faculty of Business, Economics and Law, La Trobe University, Bundoora.

This thesis presents an exploratory study of the family consumer decision-making (FCDM) process in the context of Saudi Arabia based on the perspectives of a sample of Saudi husbands. Existing studies into FCDM emanate predominantly from Western cultural settings, deploy questionnaire survey methods and offer insights into ‘who’ and ‘what’ questions. Less well developed are insights into the ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions pertaining to the process rather than the antecedents and outcomes of FCDM, especially from under-explored non-Western/Islamic contexts. This study thus investigates spousal roles and conflict resolution strategies in FCDM, and seeks to understand whether and how stage in the family life-cycle, generational and intergenerational influence shape that process. The study deploys an exploratory research design and a qualitative methodology. The sample comprises 14 Saudi men from seven nuclear Saudi families (all married, father-son pairs, resident in the city of Jeddah) identified using a purposive sampling strategy. Data were generated from 30 semi-structured interviews, 8 focus groups and 14 consumer diaries, analysed thematically. The study shows that while spouses play different roles in FCDM (with wives most typically reported as decision initiators and husbands decision gatekeepers), these roles vary according to levels of interest, involvement, product category and conflict. While Saudi spouses deploy a range of conflict resolution strategies, husbands will most typically use their control over household budget and delay/postpone decisions to solve conflict, and adopt passive approaches to conflict resolution. Notable changes in spousal roles, power/control and conflict resolution strategies are reported over the family life-cycle, and mutual intergenerational influence and generational differences are also in evidence in the findings. The primary contribution of the study is the advancement of FCDM theory in general and family power theory in particular by developing a multifaceted insight into the process of FCDM based on concepts previously unexamined in relation to one another. Furthermore, in presenting a context-specific form of knowledge from an under-researched setting, the study generates distinctive cultural insights into FCDM which pluralize the theoretical terrain. A notable limitation of the study is the exclusion of women’s voices from the project for cultural and religious reasons.