An Evaluation of Religion's Impact on the Consumer Behavior (A Case Study of Isfahani Married Women)

The quality and quantity of consumption of society’s goods and services are two of the societies’ major economic and value concerns. In the societies based on Islamic values, imprudential consumption and the so-called Israf and Tabdzir are viewed as important economic problems. Our topic here is that the religion’s different dimensions affect consumer behavior and attitude. Adopting asociological approach and using Islamic economics’ theoretical foundations, thus, we have examined the impact of four different aspects of religion - ritual, empirical, consequential, and cognitive - on the consumer behaviors and attitudes of the households in Isfahan. The research has been performed adopting survey method and using organized questionnaire, and the required data have been collected, using the cluster sampling method, from a 383-member sample of Isfahani married women. In order to examine the simultaneous effect of variables, the path analysis method in the software EQS 6.2 has been utilized, and in order to perform the correlation analysis, the software SPSS16 has been used. Our main hypothesis here is that there is some relation between different aspects of religiousness and the attitude towards consumption. The findings show that these aspects have a significant negative relation with the attitude towards consumption, and that there is a significant positive relation between the attitude towards consumption and the consumer behavior.