Qualitative approaches to life course research: Linking life story to gift giving

ABSTRACT

This paper presents qualitative approaches to life course research and elucidates the benefits with data. While marketing research in general has gradually embraced the interpretive paradigm, the field of life course study in marketing has not widely enriched, fortified, or complemented their quantitative investigations with interpretive studies. Thus, this paper presents qualitative methods suitable for life course research. The paper reviews recent life course studies that employ qualitative methods. Data collection, analysis, and interpretation methods are addressed. Both benefits and limitations of the qualitative methods are discussed. We demonstrate how to apply and use the qualitative data to study life course issues and topics. As an illustration, we link a qualitative study of the gift giving of mature consumers in Japan to Moschis’ Conceptual Life Course Model and discuss the paradigmatic principles of life course theory. The paper concludes with opportunities for future research.

本文呈现了生命历程的质化研究，并用数据阐明其好处。虽然大体上市场营销研究逐渐普及解释范例，但是市场营销的生命历程研究领域并非如此，它质化的翻译研究并未广泛普及, 强化和赞扬。因此，这篇文章呈现了适合生命历程研究的质化方式，回顾了最新采用质化方式的生命历程研究。文章强调了数据收集, 分析以及翻译方式，质化方式的优缺点都有提及。我们演示了如何将质化数据应用于生命历程问题和主题研究中去，用一个质化研究作为说明：将一位日本成年消费者向莫斯时斯的概念生命历程模型赠与礼物相联系，并讨论生命历程理论的范式原理。文章以对未来研究提供机遇而结束

KEYWORDS:

• Life course
• qualitative research
• research design
• gift giving
• mature consumers

关键词:

• 生命历程
• 定性研究
• 研究设计
• 礼物给予
• 成年消费者

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge Takeshi Matsui for his administrative and data collection efforts and George Moschis and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.