| Summary: | It is a common view that husbands and wives make decisions to purchase most major household purchases jointly. Joint purchase decision-making processes are also perceived to be complex, unstructured, and to involve conflict. Consequently, the key question facing marketers and marketing academics is - "How do couples go through complex and unstructured purchase decision-making processes that also involve conflict? .. Generally, researchers have noted that a study of conflict resolution strategies used in joint purchase decision-making processes is important for our understanding of what transpires within a joint purchase decision. Thus, previous studies have studied the typologies of conflict resolution strategies, frequency in the use of conflict resolution strategies, the different combinations of conflict resolution strategies, as well as the effects of factors such as age, length of marriage, income, education, and occupation and sex role orientation on the different combinations of conflict resolution strategies. Despite efforts to address the subject of joint purchase decision-making processes, it remains largely unexplored. In particular, the role that culture plays in influencing the use of conflict resolution strategies has also been largely ignored. Therefore, this study was undertaken to fill the gap in the cross-cultural perspective of conflict resolution strategies used in joint purchase decision-making processes. To address this gap, fourteen hypotheses derived from theoretical knowledge were specified and tested using separate samples of husbands and wives. Specifically, this is a survey-based study of a total sample of 583 married spouses of British White, Indian, and African Black origin (i.e., 295 husbands and 288 wives). Data from the British White were collected using mail surveys. To collect data for the Indians and African Blacks, non-probabilistic approaches were used, mostly hand distributed questionnaires.
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