Hej,
The research assistant internship together with Jenny Balkow and the Handelslabbet is proceeding and has sent me onto a steep learning journey.
As I have reported in my last blog post, our goal is to develop a digital retail lab where marketing experiments can be conducted with.
So far, a member of the Handelsbladet developed a basic version of a webshop from where we can base the experimental design.
Offering is a wide variety of research directions that can be departed on with this digital retail lab, our goal was to find a common theme we are all interested in and start developing an experimental guideline from there. This guideline should serve as a starting point for a funding proposal to further develop the digital retail lab.
During one of the proceeding Zoom meetings, we decided to focus on the topic of consumer trust and decision making support during online shopping.
My task then was to do a literature review of the theoretical foundations of trust, how it can be measured, and how it relates to personalization, and inform the Handelslabbet team about my findings.
What I found was, that trust is a theme with a wide variety of definitions, approaches, and views. While most researchers agree on the importance of trust in the conduct of human affairs ( Bhattacharya and Divennev, 1998), there is also an acknowledgment of the difficulty of finding a common, all-encompassing definition (Hosmer, 1995; Husted, 1998; McKnight et al., 2002, Rousseau et al., 1998). Scholars tend to define trust according to their disciplinary worldview resulting in different views depending on whether the scholar works in the discipline of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and so on (Rousseau and Sitkin, 1998). Trying to summarize the different views, similarities, and research streams wasn’t easy for me. The number of articles covering different angles of this topic seemed endless to me, and until now I fear of having missed out on an important puzzle piece of the construct. Databases like Elsevier recommend similar or interesting articles after every click resulting in a tab bar of several kilometers and the task of coming to a presentable result seemingly impossible. Suffering from FOMOA (fear of missing out on an article) led me to consult one of my friends that has experience in the study of social sciences.
She reassured me that I was on the right path, that when I keep finding similar citations and findings in articles I am nearing the threshold of finding more news and that my initial approach of starting to code and cluster my notes was not as bad as I thought.
Finally, I managed to arrive at a presentable end-result and shared my clusters with the researchers of the Handelslabbet.
The variety of definitions, seeming similar and different at the same time, leads to scholars employing different measures of trust in their research models and experimental designs.
Some measure “purchase intention” as a result of trust while others view “click-through intentions” as the same. But does the action of purchasing from an online shop or clicking on an ad show that one trusts?
This question continues to guide me through my present task, which is: stop reading articles, work with what I have, analyze the existing research models and hypotheses, and create my research model out of the findings.
Jenny and the research team guide me through this process and I can say, that so far this experience has been a first for me and a huge learning curve.
The research assistant internship together with Jenny Balkow and the Handelslabbet is proceeding and has sent me onto a steep learning journey.
As I have reported in my last blog post, our goal is to develop a digital retail lab where marketing experiments can be conducted with.
So far, a member of the Handelsbladet developed a basic version of a webshop from where we can base the experimental design.
Offering is a wide variety of research directions that can be departed on with this digital retail lab, our goal was to find a common theme we are all interested in and start developing an experimental guideline from there. This guideline should serve as a starting point for a funding proposal to further develop the digital retail lab.
During one of the proceeding Zoom meetings, we decided to focus on the topic of consumer trust and decision making support during online shopping.
My task then was to do a literature review of the theoretical foundations of trust, how it can be measured, and how it relates to personalization, and inform the Handelslabbet team about my findings.
What I found was, that trust is a theme with a wide variety of definitions, approaches, and views. While most researchers agree on the importance of trust in the conduct of human affairs ( Bhattacharya and Divennev, 1998), there is also an acknowledgment of the difficulty of finding a common, all-encompassing definition (Hosmer, 1995; Husted, 1998; McKnight et al., 2002, Rousseau et al., 1998). Scholars tend to define trust according to their disciplinary worldview resulting in different views depending on whether the scholar works in the discipline of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and so on (Rousseau and Sitkin, 1998). Trying to summarize the different views, similarities, and research streams wasn’t easy for me. The number of articles covering different angles of this topic seemed endless to me, and until now I fear of having missed out on an important puzzle piece of the construct. Databases like Elsevier recommend similar or interesting articles after every click resulting in a tab bar of several kilometers and the task of coming to a presentable result seemingly impossible. Suffering from FOMOA (fear of missing out on an article) led me to consult one of my friends that has experience in the study of social sciences.
She reassured me that I was on the right path, that when I keep finding similar citations and findings in articles I am nearing the threshold of finding more news and that my initial approach of starting to code and cluster my notes was not as bad as I thought.
Finally, I managed to arrive at a presentable end-result and shared my clusters with the researchers of the Handelslabbet.
The variety of definitions, seeming similar and different at the same time, leads to scholars employing different measures of trust in their research models and experimental designs.
Some measure “purchase intention” as a result of trust while others view “click-through intentions” as the same. But does the action of purchasing from an online shop or clicking on an ad show that one trusts?
This question continues to guide me through my present task, which is: stop reading articles, work with what I have, analyze the existing research models and hypotheses, and create my research model out of the findings.
Jenny and the research team guide me through this process and I can say, that so far this experience has been a first for me and a huge learning curve.
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