The Role of Quality and Price in Purchasing Sport Footwear in Iranian University Student Athletes

The aim of the present study was to assess the viewpoints on the role of quality and price in purchasing sport footwear in athlete students. The statistical population consisted of university student athletes participating in 10th Iran Sport Olympiad of Universities. To collect data, 450 researcher-made questionnaires were distributed among male and female university student athletes who were selected by cluster random sampling method. Out of returned questionnaires, 380 questionnaires were accepted and analyzed. To analyze data, dependent and independent t tests and oneway analysis of variance were used. The results showed that quality was significantly more important than price. The importance of both quality and price was affected by gender, that is to say quality was more important to women than men and price was more important to men than women. The importance of quality was independent from income; however, price had different degrees of importance among different income groups; an increase in income reduced the importance of price. More than 45% of respondents believed that the quality of domestic sport footwear was lower than imported brands. The ratio of domestic sport footwear purchase to imported footwear was less than 1 per 3 pair.