UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item DERIVING HAPPINESS FROM CONSUMPTION: TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF ENJOYMENT IN CONSUMER CONSUMPTION(2019) Wu, Yuechen; Ratner, Rebecca K; Business and Management: Marketing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation includes three essays that investigate factors that influence how much enjoyment consumers derive from their various daily consumption. The first essay examines whether and when shared experiences are more or less enjoyable than solo experiences. Whereas prior research has primarily focused on the social benefits of having an activity partner in leisure activities, we propose that sharing experiences requires coordination with others, which can take the consumer’s attention away from the consumption activity, potentially reducing their enjoyment of the activity compared to those who engage in the experience solo. We demonstrate that lack of clarity about a partner’s level of interests in the activity can make it difficult for consumers to coordinate and focus on a shared activity, and ultimately enjoy the experience, relative to solo experiences or shared experiences for which clarity is high. The second essay speaks to consumers’ inhibition that prevents them from deriving happiness from rewarding solitary leisure experiences. Prior research shows that consumers are inhibited from engaging in public leisure activities alone because of negative evaluations on social connectedness they anticipate from others. This essay examines how people actually evaluate consumers who engage in these activities solo versus accompanied. We demonstrate that though observers indeed perceive solo (vs. accompanied) consumers to be less socially connected, observers also make more positive inferences for solo consumers on the trait of openness, and overall view solo consumers as favorably as accompanied consumers. The third essay examines the effect of ownership status (i.e., whether a consumer owns the product or not) on consumers’ adaptation to a product. We demonstrate that consuming a product for which consumers do not have ownership (vs. have ownership) prolongs happiness derived from the product. We propose that when consumers do not have ownership of a product, they experience an elevated arousal, which could help to slow down the otherwise natural process of hedonic adaptation.Item What Makes "Fun" Fun? Insights into Children's Participation in Physical Activity(2015) Hopple, Christine J.; Andrews, David; Graham, George; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A rapidly accumulating body of literature points to fun as an important factor in the physical activity participation choices of children. Few studies, however, have conducted systematic, in-depth investigations into what children mean when they say an activity is fun. Scanlan and Lewthwaite’s (1986) Sport Enjoyment Model was used to guide this inquiry into children’s enjoyment of physical activity in the contexts of Physical Education, organized youth, and recreation. This descriptive, mixed-methods study involved a convenience sample of 98 fourth through sixth graders from six classes in three non-traditional public schools in a mid-Atlantic state. Data collection methods included focus group and duo interviews, an activity-related drawing, and a quantitative measure including both Likert and open-ended questions. Qualitative data was inductively analyzed using comparative analysis techniques with triangulation occurring across all data sources. Findings suggest that the reasons children gave for enjoying and not enjoying physical activity were numerous, varied, and compelling in nature. Although many factors were perceived similarly by many children, others were perceived quite differently. Thus, there appears to be an idiomatic tendency of fun – that is, what each individual child will perceive to be either fun or not is particular to that specific child, with some factors being more salient than others. Contextual factors also strongly influence whether a child will find a specific physical activity to be fun or not, to the extent that these appear to have a stronger influence on the enjoyability of an activity than the activity itself. Lastly, data-gathering methods used with children (activity-oriented questions and card-sorting during focus group interviews) were very effective at stimulating discussion amongst children and uncovering what they think in a very non-threatening manner. Taken together, then, results suggest that the reasons as to why any given child will find an activity to be fun or not fun are complex, interwoven, highly individualistic, and dependent upon a number of contextual factors. Results can aid key players in developing policies and programs which hold the potential to increase children’s enjoyment in physical activity while concurrently decreasing their non-enjoyment of activity.