Research Study Objective
The primary purpose of this study is to measure the consumption preferences among college students. We created two categories of purchases for this comparative study: material goods purchases and life experience purchases. The study aims to gather information on which category of discretionary spending is preferred among college students.
The findings of the study can be used by many different parties. However, our goal is to be able to create valuable information for companies that want to market their products and services to college students in the Austin area. The research will hopefully benefit these companies as well as their customers (college students) by catering towards the needs of both parties when it comes to consumption trends.
Since this is a comparative research study, we did not hold any explicit hypothesis for any sort of specific outcome. However, there has been previous studies and research that have concluded that there is a preference for experiential purchases over material purchases among different samples of the population. These studies have concluded that the main reason behind these findings is that people tend to feel happier from their life experience purchases rather than material goods purchases. They conclude that an experience can create long lasting happiness as opposed to a material good that tends to result in shrinking happiness as time goes by. Another reason is that material goods tend to diminish a person’s happiness when compared to other similar goods not owned by that person. Given the results for these previous studies and research, we are inclined to believe that the outcome of our own study will obtain similar results.
Research Question
The research question for this study was formulated as follows: What kind of consumption (experiences vs material goods) is preferred by college students