Abstract

The purpose of this research is to investigate family decision making and more specifically, how decisions are made and what factors might impact them. Sex role attitudes have been related to household role behaviors and they are believed to be linked to decision influences within the family. This research addresses the family decision making process in a vacation decision context. The Brisoux-Laroche model of awareness sets is tested and the husband-wife decision influence patterns within the same decision context are examined, taking into consideration sex role attitudes of the spouses. Finally, the impact of sex role attitudes on the awareness sets is examined. The results indicate a high level of agreement between spouses when looking at the awareness set analysis: importance ratings, determinant attributes, frequency of destinations in each set, agreement on all measures as well as on presence of attributes in common sets. The perception of decision influence analysis indicates that spouses perceive certain sub-decisions to be under a different influence (husband or wife) depending on their sex role attitude; however, the trend is not clear. In terms of influence sharing, the results indicate that, as sex role attitude becomes more modern, six out of seven decisions become more egalitarian according to at least one of the spouses. Finally, looking at the relationship between awareness set profiles and sex role attitudes, it was found that set sizes and confidence levels were related to sex role attitude. Also, modern spouses chose destinations that had a different profile than those chosen by the more traditional spouses while attributing less importance to the cost of the trip.