The Impact Of Lifestyle On Consumer Behavior Research

Lifestyle refers to people's activity forms and behavior features embodied in their daily life activities as work, consumption, and interpersonal communication, it is not only affected by social system but also changes when the society changes. This change leads to the variety of people' s value, and affects their way of behavior (especially consumer behavior) as well. Existent studies on consumer behavior are mostly in fields such as economics, marketing or consumer behavior research, etc, and discussion from the perspective of sociology are quite few, studies based on the perspective of lifestyle are even rarer. Actually, the change of consumer behavior is not merely an economic phenomenon; it also reflects and embodies the change of lifestyle. As is known to all, during the past 30 years of Reform and Opening-up, China's economic and social development made remarkable achievements, and people's living standards have been greatly improved. As a result, the lifestyle of Chinese people has changed and has been changing earth-shakingly. This more directly embodies in the change of consumer behavior. This sufficiently illustrates that lifestyle changes and consumer behavior transition are closely related. However, further specific researches are still in need to know the exact kind of relation between them, or how and to what extent lifestyle does affect consumer behavior. Based on these questions, this thesis discusses the impact of lifestyle to consumer behavior from the perspective of sociology.There are various consumer behaviors due to the difference in lifestyle. Even consumer behaviors on homogeneous consumption goods are apparently different because of the variety of individual lifestyles. With this regard, this thesis tries to take credit card consumption as an example to examine the impact of lifestyle on consumer behavior. First, this thesis reviewed researches on related issues done by experts and scholars home and abroad, as theoretical supports. Second, based on comprehensively applying these research conclusions, this thesis revises the rating scale according to particularity of this study, and designs questionnaire with Lickert 5-point scale in order to realize the empirical analysis on Chinese consumer's lifestyle and credit card consumption. Last, statistical analyses are made on the data of questionnaire, applying SPSS. The thesis then highlights the impact of lifestyle to credit card consumption, and then to consumer behavior.This research mainly adopts literature research and empirical research as its methods. The former serves to provide theoretical supplies, and the latter works through SPSS statistical analyses on the data collected by questionnaire, and then demonstrates the hypothesis based on theoretical induction. The most important innovation of this research is that it begins from sociological perspective, and takes credit card consumption as example, to analyze the impact of lifestyle to consumer behavior through empirical studies. This can be thought as providing a new path for consumer behavior research in sociological vision to some extent.