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Section 3: Willingness to Purchase Recycled Products
Participant’ s willingness to buy recycled products was measured by a single item stating:‘ When possible, I select products made from recycled materials ahead of similar quality products made from non-recycled materials’. Participants were asked to state how much they agreed with this item on a 6-point Likert scale, running from strongly disagree to strongly agree.
Data Analysis
Based upon participants’ responses to section one of the questionnaire concerning their values, participants were placed into groups. The groups were determined using a K-means cluster analysis using the statistical package SPSS. The technique involves grouping together similar individuals based on certain characteristics, in this case their regard for SEV and STV. For this data set, the most appropriate solution split the participants into four groups. The groups were labelled, and given‘ nicknames’( in brackets) created by the author to help describe the group members:
• Self-enhancers: These participants scored high on SEV, and scored low on STV(‘ egocentric Edwards’)
• Non-engagers: These participants scored low on both SEV and STV(‘ non-engaging Ninas’)
• Value-opportunists: These participants scored high on both SEV and STV(‘ opportunistic Oscars’)
• Selfless-contributors: These participants scored high on STV, and scored low on SEV(‘ selfless Susans’)
The groups are ordered from those predicted to be least likely to buy recycled products, the egoistic Edwards, to those most likely to buy recycled products, the selfless Susans. A number of formal hypotheses were made: Participants in the self-enhancers group will report purchasing fewer recycled products than participants from either the selfless contributors group( H1 – hypothesis one), the value opportunists group( H2), or the non-engagers group( H3). Furthermore, participants in the selfless-contributors group will purchase more recycled products than participants in the value opportunists group( H4) or the non-engagers group( H5).