Identity : its purpose and function within consumer residential property purchase decisions

Abstract

The purpose and function of identity in extant literature suggested that enquiry into self and functional congruity, within a high involvement consumer decision-making context such as the purchase of a house, would be significant and address evident research gaps. To date the emerging residential property literature has given limited attention to consumer decision-making processes. Furthermore, the self and functional congruity literature has focused on branded, low involvement and post purchase evaluation with no consideration of all four types of self-congruity or likely moderators such as knowledge and trust. Therefore the aim of this thesis was to: Investigate relationships between functional and self-congruity within the context of consumer residential property purchase decisions. This aim was investigated through addressing the following research questions: RQ1 – What is the relationship between actual self-congruity, ideal self-congruity, actual social self-congruity and ideal social self-congruity and self-congruity during the residential property purchase decision? RQ2 – What is the effect of self and functional congruity on residential property purchase intentions? RQ3 - What is the effect of knowledge on functional and self-congruity during the residential property purchase decision-making process? RQ4 - What is the effect of trust on functional and self-congruity during the residential property purchase decision-making process? The research utilised quantitative primary data collection, surveying consumers currently in the market to purchase a new residential property. Using a two-step structural equation modelling approach the data was analysed using the AMOS software program. Subsequently, eleven hypotheses were accepted and three were rejected. The results indicated that: Actual self-congruity, ideal self-congruity, actual social self-congruity and ideal social self-congruity all had positive relationships with self-congruity during residential property purchase decision-making. Self-congruity and functional congruity both had a direct relationship with intention to act, and self-congruity had an indirect relationship with intention to act through functional congruity. Ideal self-congruity had the strongest relationship with self-congruity. While the results indicated that knowledge had a relationship with functional congruity they also indicated that it had no significant relationship with self-congruity. Trust had a relationship with self-congruity however it had no significant relationship with functional congruity