The role of family members in family purchase decisions

The family plays an important role in decision making, and who plays the most important role in family purchasing decisions depends on the personality, gender, interests and attitudes of the family. So, it is important to accept the perspective of every member of family in decision making. The purpose of this research is to examine the role of family members (parents and children) in purchase decisions. The research is descriptive in terms of method and functional in terms of purpose. The statistical population of the study consisted of all the families living in Shiraz. There were 323 families from ten districts of Shiraz selected through stratified (classified) sampling. The data were collected by means of a questionnaire. Using Kolmogorof, Mann-Whitney and Kruskal test, the data were analyzed, and, using structural equations, the hypotheses were evaluated. To measure the reliability of the questionnaire, the Cronbach's alpha coefficient was used, and the results were calculated by the SPSS software. Since Cronbach's alpha was more than 0.7 for each indicator, the indexes proved to have a good reliability. To evaluate the validity of the questionnaire, the content validity was used. The results showed a positive and significant relationship between the demographic variables and purchase decision making’s. There was also a significant relationship between the variables of the parents’ characteristics and product type on one hand and family purchase decision making on the other. However, there was no significant relationship between family characteristics and purchase decision making. Therefore, this hypothesis was rejected.