Scale Development and Validation of Gender-Specific Consumer Decision-Making Styles : A Case of Indian Teenagers

Research on consumer decision-making styles (CDMS) is popular in emerging economies. Despite empirical evidence supporting the role of gender in influencing these styles, researchers have measured CDMS using a common scale. To address this concern, the study developed gender-specific scales for measuring CDMS of Indian teenagers. It also established the country specific nature of the CDMS scale by comparing the findings in other countries. The paper describes a step-by-step scale development and validation process deploying exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses on a dataset of 1,216 teenagers. Two-tailed t-test was used to measure the gender differences between the CDMS characteristics. The process resulted in seven factor scales with six common characteristics. In contrast with other countries, new traits were identified