Shopping Experiences of Aging Consumers in the US: a Meta-Analysis

Team: Professor Juanjuan Wu (First Author), and Yiling Zhang (Second Author)

Program: Apparel Design

The primary research question is "What are the shopping experiences of aging consumers in multi-channel retailing in the US?"

From over 40 thousand articles, this meta-analysis of aging consumers in multiple shopping channels in the US finally includes 24 studies, conducted between 2000 and 2021. It adopts the Stimulus-Organism-Response model to guide the data analyses and offers a holistic view of the relationships among stimuli, organisms, and responses. This study incorporates consumers’ personal traits and their moderating effect in the Stimuli-Organism-Response model, and it further introduces an “orientation” variable to represent consumer traits, borrowing from the Orientations-Stimuli-Orientations-Responses model in communication studies. This study thus develops an extended Stimuli-Organism-Response model as a conceptual and theoretical framework for future research on shopping behaviors of aging consumer. Organized around the extended Stimuli-Organism-Response model, findings from previous studies are reported to enhance our understanding of aging consumers’ needs in and responses to various shopping channels.

Funders: National Institute of Food and Agriculture