Knowledge that Transforms

Television advertisers of over-the-counter drugs have been accused of contributing to illicit drug consumption by engendering a pain-pill-pleasure mentality in American society. This article reviews and critically appraises the research, and suggests how consumer researchers might contribute to this critical social issue.

Focusing on the validity of subjective expected utility (SEU) choice models for explaining decision making, this research developed a novel methodology that explains subjective probability and utility scales, assigns values on these defined scales to various consumer decision problems, and has individuals estimate missing decisional components. Results from seven experiments are reported.

This study assesses the impact of proprietary medicine advertising on children. Only limited support is found for a direct link between exposure to medicine commercials and a child's beliefs, attitudes, and requests to parents regarding medicine. There is no evidence of a link between medicine advertising and a child's use of proprietary medicines.

The accuracy of women's reports about the cutoffs and the number of factors used when evaluating birth-control devices was tested. The results indicate that memories for these aspects of the judgments were fairly accurate, and that cutoffs were popular when subjects made hasty judgments and imagined an imminent commitment.

The challenges and problems encountered in evaluating consumer education programs are discussed. This article focuses on the evaluation research literature and the experiences of the authors in attempting to evaluate a major consumer education program.

The hedonic index technique is used to estimate the implicit prices for units of breakfast cereal characteristics. Analysis showed that buyers value many attributes; the value placed on each is dependent upon the class of cereal evaluated. Results suggest this technique has potential for assessing buyer's purchasing behavior for nondurable goods.

George J. Szybillo, Arlene K. Sosanie, Aaron Tenenbein; Family Member Influence in Household Decision Making, Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 6, Issue

This paper presents a profile of the consumerist and tests for significant differences between the consumerist and the average consumer. The findings suggest that the consumerist differs significantly on socioeconomic, life style, attitudinal, readership, and listenership variables, while constituting a sizeable segment (15 percent) of the population.

Conjoint analysis studies usually calculate utilities for several discrete attribute levels and then use linear interpolation to predict utilities for other attribute levels. Instead of linear interpolation, utility functions can be used. This paper compares the predictive abilities of the utility function approach and the procedure of linear interpolation.

Journal Article Concrete Action Plans in TV Messages to Increase Reading of Drug Warnings Get access Peter Wright Peter Wright Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 6, Issue 3, December 1979, Pages 256–269, https://doi.org/10.1086/208767 Published: 01 December 1979 Article history Received: 01 March 1979 Revision received: 01 August 1979 Published: 01 December 1979