Unheard Consumers: A Resource Perspective on the Goal Pursuit of Families with Hearing Impaired Children

摘要

The manner in which people pursue pivotal goals related to their life projects is an important topic in consumer behavior and social psychology. However, little is known about how marketplace interactions determine how consumers overcome challenges in central life projects, such as parenthood and raising children. For example, a diagnosis of a newborn's disability often contradicts anticipated visions and disrupts daily family life. Specifically, we have a limited understanding of the inherent dynamics in consumer goal pursuit over time that result from the interplay of resource endowments, marketplace interactions, and goal progress. We know even less about such processes as performed by collective consumers. Notwithstanding the importance of families as social spheres in daily consumption experiences, extant research rarely considers such complex collectives and their behavior. We examine the dynamics in goal pursuit of collective consumers: families with hearing impaired children. Our aim is to shed light on (1) how families define their goals after a shock to their life project of raising a healthy child, (2) what resources are important in order to reach these goals, and (3) how formal (e.g., medical service providers) and informal (e.g., other affected consumers) marketplace interactions shape consumers' resources and goal attainment.