Family Identity: A Framework of Identity Interplay in Consumption Practices

Abstract

"Being a family" is a vitally important collective enterprise central to many consumption experiences and replete with new challenges in contemporary society. We advance a framework to learn how families draw on communication forms and use marketplace resources to manage interplays among individual, relational (e.g., couple, sibling, parent-child), and collective identities. Our framework also outlines potential moderators of this identity-management process. To demonstrate the value of our framework for consumer researchers, we propose numerous research questions and offer applications in the areas of family decision making, consumer socialization, and person-object relations. (c) 2008 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..