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An attributional explanation of consumers' responses to government regulations and corporate social responsibility, with implications for childhood obesity

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There have been multiple calls for research on consumers' responses to social issues, regulatory changes, and corporate behavior. Thus, this dissertation proposes and tests a conceptual framework of parents' responses to government regulations and corporate social responsibility (CSR) that address juvenile obesity. This research builds on Attribution Theory to examine…

There have been multiple calls for research on consumers' responses to social issues, regulatory changes, and corporate behavior. Thus, this dissertation proposes and tests a conceptual framework of parents' responses to government regulations and corporate social responsibility (CSR) that address juvenile obesity. This research builds on Attribution Theory to examine the impact of government regulations and CSR on consumers' attitudes and their subsequent behavior. Three pilot studies and three main experiments were conducted; a between-subjects and randomized experimental design being used to capture the effects of regulations and corporate actions on product satisfaction, company evaluations, and behavioral intentions, while examining the mediating role of attributions of responsibility for a negative product outcome. This research has implications for policy makers and marketing practitioners and scholars. This is the first study to offer a new perspective, based on attributions of blame, to explain the mechanism that drives consumers' responses to government regulations. Considering numerous calls for government actions that address childhood obesity, it is important to understand how and why consumers respond to such regulations. The results illustrated that certain policies may have unintended consequences due to unexpected attributions of blame for unhealthy products. Only recently have researchers tried to address the psychological mechanism through which CSR has an impact on consumers' attitudes and behavior. To date, few studies have investigated attributions as a mediating variable in the transfer of CSR associations on consumer responses. Nonetheless, this is the first study that concentrates on attributions of responsibility, per se, to explain the impact of CSR on company evaluations. This dissertation extends previous research, where locus, stability, and controllability mediated the relationship between CSR and attributions of blame; the degree of blame being consequential to brand evaluations. The current results suggest that attributions of responsibility, per se, mediate the impact of CSR on company evaluations. Additionally, attributions of blame are measured as the degree to which consumers take personal responsibility for a negative product outcome. This highlights a new role of the CSR construct, as a moderator of consumers' self-serving bias, a fundamental psychological response that has been neglected in the marketing literature.
ContributorsDumitrescu, Claudia (Author) / Shaw Hughner, Renée (Thesis advisor) / Schmitz, Troy G. (Committee member) / Seperich, George (Committee member) / Shultz, Ii, Clifford J. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Examining Processes That Reflect Heterogeneity in Maritally Satisfied Couples

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In the mid-1970s, social scientists began observing marital dyad conversations in laboratory settings with the hope of determining which observable features best discriminate couples who report being either satisfied or unsatisfied with their relationship. These studies continued until about a decade ago when, in addition to increasing laboratory costs slowing…

In the mid-1970s, social scientists began observing marital dyad conversations in laboratory settings with the hope of determining which observable features best discriminate couples who report being either satisfied or unsatisfied with their relationship. These studies continued until about a decade ago when, in addition to increasing laboratory costs slowing the pace of new data collection, researchers realized that distressed couples were easier to quantitatively describe than nondistressed couples. Specifically, distressed couples exhibit rigid patterns of negativity whereas couples who report being maritally satisfied show minimal rigidity in the opposite direction \u2014 positivity. This was, and is, a theoretical dilemma: how can clinicians understand and eventually modify distressed relationships when the behavior of satisfied couples are less patterned, less predictable and more diverse? A recent study by Griffin and Li (2015), using contemporary machine learning techniques, reanalyzed existing marital interaction data and found that, contrary to expectation and existing theory, nondistressed couples should be further subdivided into two groups \u2014 those who are predictably positive or neutral and those who interact using diverse and varying levels of positive and negative behaviors. The latter group is the focus of this thesis. Using these recent findings as discussion points, I review how the unexpected behaviors in this novel group can maintain and possibly perpetuate marital satisfaction.
ContributorsAbdul-Quadir, Hasana (Author) / Griffin, William A. (Thesis director) / Li, Xun (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Hugh Downs School of Human Communication (Contributor)
Created2015-05