Summary on Compulsive Consumption Behaviour"

“Compulsive consumption behaviours” is a journal by Julianne Trauttmann-Attmann and Tricia Widner Johnson who try to determine if “bulimic behaviours, Fashion interest and and the importance of being well dressed had a casual relationship with compulsive buying” the research is based on the relationships among “binge eating, compulsive clothing buying and fashion orientation”. From this research the authors are trying to find the importance of consumption and whether one behaviour will link to another. “compulsive behaviour may be reached by an examination of whether or not one compulsive behaviour leads to another”. It is important to understand that this article is not just made up of the authors thoughts and opinions but refers to a large amount of other research on similar topics such as Bullimia, compulsive shopping behaviour, self image and many more. The authors use techniques such as questionnaires and the BULIT-R (Thelan et al., 1991)bulimia test given to a group of students in order to gain valuable information towards their topic. One particular test which the authors refer to is a research method by Edwards (1993) where he uses a 13 item Likert-Like scale. With Edwards permission the authors changed the scale slightly from general compulsive buying to compulsive clothing buying to fit the purposes of their research. In the results of their tests they found that there was a positive link between “disordered eating behaviours and compulsive clothing buying”. They also discovered that there wasn’t a strong link between “binging behaviours and interest in fashion or the importance of being well dressed.” This shows that people who have binging tendencies do not necessarily have a great interest in fashion as such but rather they have an interest in buying clothes for the sake of buying. Although eating and buying clothes are two completely different activities, the results show that people adopt the same behaviours for both. This is particularly true in female consumers.
When reading this article it is important to understand the idea of consumption and reason why people consume fashion. Also knowing the difference between people who are interested in fashion and those who are binge eaters who buy the sake of buying. In understanding these point it becomes clear that consumers consume for different reasons.
The authors have put forward very interesting facts and research and although they did mention at the end that gender should be a variable for further examination, it would have been a fairer test if males took part in the research. “the present study utilised female college students in the U.S as participants” Their assumption that female are mostly “ at risk “ could well be true but may not always be the case as their reference was taken from 2002 and the journal is written in 2009. Over a 7 year period the most at risk people may have changed. The authors also mention that people who suffer from binging disorder are often recommended by therapists to take up shopping as a solution but in fact they are probably passing them onto another disorder. If binge eaters read this journal this may be of help not to shop compulsively or vice versa.


Trautmann-Attmann, J. Johnson, T W. 2009. Compulsive Consumption Behaviours: investigating amoung binge eating, compulsive clothing buying and fashion orientation. International Journal of Consumer Studies, 33.