Hello Everyone - this is my first blog for Psychology Today. I am very excited to get to know you and also to share my research with you. I am a Texan (from Austin) and I went to the University of Texas at Austin for all of my degrees (go Longhorns!). I also went to high school in Austin and met my husband during high school. We have been married 35 years. 11 years ago, we adopted our precious baby girl from China. She made us a family. In 2008, I got breast cancer and I had to have a bilateral mastectomy and reconstruction (I want to appear normal for our daughter). I am still taking a cancer pill (must take this for 5 years to help prevent a recurrence) and I am experiencing lots of side effects from that pill.
My entire academic career, I have studied consumers who are not like others. They are just a "little left of center." I started my career studying what I named "use innovators." These are consumers who think of new uses for old products, who save broken products that they might use again and who enjoy taking things apart (and maybe putting them back together). Proctor and Gamble was very interested in this work and they sponsored my dissertation. I published several papers on use innovativeness. I am still interested in this area and want to expand it to do-it-yourself-ers, as I still believe this is an under-studied area and an interesting one.
Then I began studying consumers who spend a lot of time shopping and when they are not shopping, they spend a lot of time reading about, thinking about, and talking to others about shopping. It turns out that these people also spend more than others (we studied clothing-both men's and women's, at a retail store, at a flea market and at a craft market). In all cases, the heavy shoppers were the heavy spenders.
Now, I study compulsive buyers. Compulsive buying is a disorder similar to many other disorders that exist, such as binge eating, anorexia, kleptomania, pathological gambling and others. Many researchers consider compulsive buying to be part obsessive compulsive disorder and part impulse control disorder. Both of these disorders have repetition in common (that is, the compulsive buying is repeated over and over). Obsessive-compulsive disorder also includes thinking about spending a good deal of the time and having one's life center around spending. Impulse control disorder is grouped with disorders such as compulsive Internet use and explosive personality disorder (along with others). Most compulsive buyers that I have studied thus far are women who spend too much on clothing, shoes, accessories and make-up.
I do not think it is appropriate to laugh about compulsive spending and call it "retail therapy" or refer to compulsive buyers as "shopaholics." The reason is that most compulsive buyers need help to stop their behavior. They know that they are spending too much. They know that they try to hide their behavior by sneaking packages into the house or ordering on the Internet when no one can see (either at work or when others are out of the house). They know that they argue with their spouse about overspending. My research confirms these behaviors. In addition, I have found that many compulsive buyers have unopened packages in their closet or price tags still on items that they have not worn. An important point from this research is that we found many more compulsive buyers in our samples than has been found before. We found 15.5%, 8.9% and 16% of our samples to be compulsive buyers. If this figure holds up in future research, that is a significant increase over what other authors have found (around 5%).
In my next blog, I will show you the scale I developed to measure compulsive buying. This is a scale that you can take at home and score on your own. I will also tell you about some other research involving the Internet and compulsive buying. I hope to hear from many of you. I am not a therapist that will offer you tips to stop compulsive buying, but a Professor at the University of Richmond who will let you know about the latest research on compulsive buying, compulsive collecting, and hoarding. I hope to hear your stories, your comments, about your lives if you suffer from compulsive buying or any of the other topics I mentioned in this blog.
xoxoxo Nancy
