Differential involvement with products and issues : an exploratory study

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Faculty Working Papers

Differential Involvement With Products

and Issues: An Exploratory Study

Nancy T. Hupfer and David M. Gardner

University of Illinois

College of Commerce and Business Administration

University of Illinois at U rba n a - C h a m p a i g n

FACULTY WORKING PAPERS
College of Commerce and Business Administration
University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign
August 2, 1971

Differential Involvement With Products

and Issues: An Exploratory Study

Nancy T. Hupfer and David M. Gardner

University of Illinois

To Be Presented At

Association For Consumer Research
Annual Conference
University of Maryland
September 1, 1971

No, 21

This paper reports findings intended to clarify thinking about an
ambiguous variable that is often assumed away or designed into behavioral
studies in an arbitrary manner. This troublesome variable, ego- involvement,*
is often given cavalier treatment because of the difficulty of accurately
defining, measuring and, more importantly, recognizing its importance as
a critical variable.

The topic of involvement has not been extensively explored in the liter-
ature. An occasional study appears dealing with involvement with issues (12)
and also an occasional study dealing with importance of products (15,2), but
no study has reported combining these two categories to explore the relative
involvement of people with issues and products.

Cardozo in his study on the influence of effort in satisfaction implied
that the more valuable or important a product is to a consumer, the more
effort he will put forth to acquire it (1). Likewise, Sherif, Sherif and
Nebergall suggest that involvement with a topic or issue influences how
information relating to that particular topic or issue is processed (12,
p. 242-44). And, one of the more widely researched issues in the roarketing
and social psychology literature - cognitive dissonance - has as one of
Its main tenets that the importance of cognitive elements affects the mag-
nitude of dissonance (3), Also, it is a truism that the more central a
belief is to a person's view of himself and the world, the more difficult
it is to modify that belief.

* Ego-involvement as used in this paper is the definition offered by
Freedman: "a general level of interest in or concern about an issue
without reference to a specific position." (4)

2

Yet, surprisingly, there seems to be little hard evidence regarding
what issues, topics or products are important or ego-involving and those
that are low in importance or ego -involvement. Much of our thinking
about ego -involvement is based upon intuition, so perhaps it is time to
examine the accuracy of these assumptions.

Muzafer Sherif has been concerned with involvement as a major com-
ponent in his approach to attitudes and attitude change. He suggests
that "ego" is an unstable constellation of attitudes which can be referred
to as ego-attitudes. These attitudes, which are characteristic of the
person and a part of him, form with respect to objects, persons, situ-
ations, and groups. The contents (objects, persons, etc.) of the ego
provide a frame of reference for the individual so that he may adjust
his social behavior. Ego-involvement exists, then, when any conscious
or unconscious stimulus is related by the individual to the domain of
the ego. Ego-involvement affects not only what will be learned and how
it will be learned, but also how the individual behaves and makes judg-
ments. Thus, judgments and behavior, which follow from the identification
of oneself with certain values and attributes are, to that extent, ego-
involved. Accordingly, the degree of ego- involvement can be determined
by the relative importance of attitudes that the individual holds regarding
the object or issue. This degree of ego -involvement can also be called
the intensity with which an attitude is held (13).

For Sherif, ego- involvement is an internal factor which operates in
a judgmental situation and which has direction. For example, an individ-
ual would be positively ego-involved with his spouse and negativel;/ ego-
involved with an enemy (14).

3

A method for measuring ego- involvement has been developed and tested
by Sherif, Sherif and Nebergall (12). Their procedure measures involve-
ment through a judgmental process in which attitudes are expressed in
terms of attitudes of acceptance, rejection and noncommitment . Opera-
tionally, they define^ involvement as being high when the latitude of
rejection is large relative to the latitude of acceptance with the lati-
tude of noncommitment being almost non-existent. They have studied such
issues as prohibition, desegregation and presidential elections.

The problems and limitations existing in the work of Sherif, Sherif
and Nebergall point up the gaping holes in our understanding of ego-
involvement. While they have dealt with issues, the Issues were probably
highly involving to start with. Naturally people would be involved with
elections in an election year, so their results probably cannot be extra-
polated to less involving issues or products. Likewise, Sherif, Sherif
and Nebergall were primarily interested in involvement within a certain
situation (i.e., situational involvement). The effects of situational
constraints and their influence on an individual's feelings and action
tendencies is not to be denied, but the measurement of involvement without
respect to the situation has much, if not more, to offer those interested
in message-processing by people. This is based on the premise that com-
munications will be differentially processed depending on the level of
involvement with the topic of the communication.

Preedman proposed two definitions of Involvement: 1) Involvement
is an "interest in, concern about, or commitment to a particular position
on an issue," and 2) Involvement is a "general level of interest in or
concern about an issue without reference to a specific position." (4)

4

Kovland's analysis of the divergence of results between attitude
change in the experimental situation and through surveys gives support
to this study by stating that deeply involving issues can be used in
experiments, which to some extent, was the method of exploration used
in this study. Since attitude change, in particular, is not relevant,
we do not need to deal with the reasons for discrepancy, but his sugges-
tions with respect to involving issues are useful (5).

Rokeach's interpretation of attitudes and values gives insight into
the study of involvement. He suggests that individuals have a hierarchy
of values along a continuum of importance, which is called the indi-
vidual's value system. Attitudes and values are interconnected within
the individual to form a hierarchical mental organization which is intern-
ally consistent. Changes in either attitudes or values affect the entire
system, which in turn usually produces a change in behavior. In an actual
measurement of values, Rokeach found a relationship between "terminal"
values (world at peace, equality of all men, freedom, national security)
and involvement. He reports that values transcend the situation and pro-
vide a standard for guiding an individual's attitudes, actions, and
emotions (11) .

Perspective is given to the understanding of involvement by Krugman,
who suggests that involvement with a product or issue is distinctly
different from involvement with the channel or media through which a
communication about some product or issue is received. Involvement with
advertisements is operationally defined as, "the number of connections,
conscious bridging experiences or personal references per minute, that
the subject makes between the content or the persuasive stimulus and the

5

content of his own life," (10) Krugman demonstrates that by this opera-
tional definition people are less involved with television advertising
than with advertisements appearing in magazines. He has also demon-
strated this same phenomenon by recorded brain waves of a subject
watching television commercials or reading a magazine (8).

Krugman also argues that most people are rather low-involved with
television and with the products advertised on television. Therefore,
he argues that what really takes place is not persuasion, but a type
of association learning that may not result in any attitude change until
(or even after) the person is confronted with a stimulus such as a package
in the store (9) .

Reviewing the literature, then, we find that:

1. Involvement refers to ego- involving attitudes.

2. The relative importance of issues to the individual is a measure of
involvement.

3. Communications have differing effects depending on the involvement
with the topic by the receiver of the communication.

The following study is designed to test empirically the widespread
intuitive hypothesis that issues are more important (ego-involving) than
products and to give some evidence of product and issue ranking on this
variable.

Twenty products and twenty issues were chosen for investigation. In
general the products were representative of goods that college students
would be knowledgeable about and either have purchased or could reasonably
anticipate purchasing in the next few years. Likewise, issues were repre-
sentative of those about which college students would have some knowledge.

6

It was not the purpose of tVits study to investigate a subject's
position on an issue or brand, nor the usage rate of a product or the
amount of time spent in relationship to an issue.

After extensive pre-testing it was found that the word "importance"
most closely approximated the concept of ego- involvement used in this
study.* Other words tested were 'meaningful', 'central', 'satisfaction',
•involvement' and 'significant.' It is interesting to note that the
word 'involvement' could not be used because of its extensive use with
the war (i.e., involvement in Viet Nam) and other current issues in the
sense of physical participation in various activities such that other
meanings seem to have been forgotten.

Subjects were forty-four male students enrolled in an undergraduate
consumer behavior course at the University of Illinois-Urbana . Each
subject was given a list of ten issues and ten products which he was to
locate on a series of eight concentric circles. (See Figure 1) The use
of concentric circles allows the respondent to express more accurately
how he perceives the importance (involvement) of the various products
and issues than if he were merely asked to rank or rate them. There is
no reason to anticipate that results obtained in this manner would be
inconsistent with those obtained using a paired-comparison procedure.
The paired-comparison procedure is not realistic for this study because
of the large number of possible pairs.

* A general level of interest in or concern about an issue or product
class without reference to a specific position or brand. Adapted from
Freedman (4), This also was consistent with the exogenous variable,
"importance of purchase" in Howard and Sheth, The Theory of Buyer
Behavior (7).

7

. Subjects were told that the arrow on the diagram moves £rom the
outer circle which represents things of no importance toward the central
point which represents the most important things imaginable. An example
used was that of the Christians who on being thrown to the lions would
place their religious beliefs right in the middle of the diagram. Sub-
jects were also reminded that their exact beliefs about a product or issue
were not what was being measured, but rather how important the issue or
product was to them personally.

RESULTS

The space between each circle was assigned a number for the purposes
of scoring, 8 being the most important (central point of the circles)
and 1 the least important (the outer circle). The data were analyzed
using a completely randomized analysis of variance procedure, with each
product and issue representing one treatment level.* Following the over-
all analysis of variance procedure, differences between Individual products
and Issues were explored using Tukey's HSD (honestly significant difference)
multiple comparison procedure (16, p. 87).

The means for all products and issues are presented in Table 1.

The analysis of variance procedure reported in Table 2 Indicates
that the difference between products and issues Is -significant at the .01
confidence level. Tukey's HSD multiple comparison test was used to make
all pair-wise comparisons. The critical value for these data, which must
be exceeded to Indicate significant difference at the .01 level, is 1.73.
The number of pair-wise comparisons significant at the .01 level of con-
fidence is considerable. The results of Tukey's HSD tests did support

* Adjustment was made for unequal n following the procedure of Winer
(16, p. 222-4).

0 !-. :sa»'j

-/ro3 io X»vsl J[0.

8

our basic assumption that issues are more involving than products,
however.

It is easy to see that those products specified by subjects as being
of little importance (low level of ego- involvement) are significantly
different from those specified as being of high importance. For Instance,
the product facial tissues is viewed as significantly less important
than beer and all higher rated products. Likewise, the product, auto-
mobile, is viewed as significantly more important than a movie and all
lower rated products.

The same tjrpe of analysis can be made for issues and between Issues
and products. Of course it is obvious that issues as a class are more
Important than products as a class (t » 12.72). Furthermore, we find
products viewed as most important are only equivalent to the middle group
of issues and are viewed as being significantly less important than the
Viet Nam war, future occupational status and the draft.

The data suggests that the products and Issues examined In this study
fall roughly into three groups, representing three levels of Importance
or ego-involvement. The first group would include those products and
Issues which have a mean value falling between 1.19 and 2.91. The second
group would Include those products and issues having a mean value between
3.00 and 4.81 and the third group would be issues having a mean value above
5.00. Obviously this is an arbitrary classification and open to much
conjecture and statistical haggling.

DISCUSSION

The extensive series of Investigations in the area of communication
and persuasion following from the work of the Yale group has increased

9

our understanding of the communication process. A' review of these studies
however, indicates that most issues used by Hovland and others would pro-
bably be considered to be relatively ego-involving or important (i.e.,
treatment of juvenile delinquents, devaluation of currency, early end
of the war with Japan (6). The frequent extension of these findings
to include response to persuasive marketing communications for relatively
low-involving products is, however, potentially misleading.

Rather than relying entirely on these findings in the future, adver-
tisers (as well as communicators in general) would be wise to subject
their own topic or product to some empirical analysis regarding its impor-
tance to their customers. If their products are truly low involving, it
means that the problem of selective exposure looms large, but it also
means that the cognitive process involved in giving meaning to commun-
ications about low- involving products is sufficiently different from
more involving products or issues to make many assumptions questionable.
For instance, Sherif, Sherif and Nebergall suggest that "evaluations or
opinions of the uninvolved or slightly involved individual will vary
significantly with changes in the order of arguments, the style and plan
of the communication, the identity of the communicator (low or high
prestige) , and almost any procedure that invests some aspect of himself
in support of one stand or another in the situation." On the other hand,
they state that people who are highly involved "are less susceptible to
attitude change in the first place and less responsive to variations in
the itmediate communication situation, such as characteristics of the
communication designed to sway him." (12, p. 16).

10
Depending on future research, there appear to be some possible appli-
cations of the findings reported here. Realizing that individuals are
probably more involved with most issues than they are with the products
they purchase and consume, the first possible application of this idea
would be in the development of advertising appeals. For most segments
of the market that the creative advertising person is trying to appeal
to, he must remember that under most conditions his product does not
rank very high in the consumer's hierarchy of things important to him.
Level of involvement by topic probably varies across a wide variety of
sociodemographic variables. This implies that, for instance, a parti-
cular social class may be highly involved with automobiles, but another
considerably less involved. Involvement with a product may be a function
of purchase experience. Similarly, an individual's knowledge about,
interest in, and concern with an issue would influence his involvement.
Finally, individuals play a variety of roles, which may influence which
products or issues are important when related to a particular role.

This does not suggest that advertisers must incorporate contemporary
Issues into their advertising appeals, but that they should place the
importance of their products in its proper perspective and appeal to the
consumer appropriately. On the other hand, when a believable connection
can be made between an issue and a product, this might attract more poten-
tial consumers (i.e., more individuals would probably perceive this adver-
tisement). Also, once a product has been related in the consumer's mind
to an issue, something important to him, the probability of this person's
retaining knowledge of the product is increased.

11

More generally, researchers studying consumers' involvement with
products in the future should realize that the continuum of involvement
does not range from product A to product Z or from brand 1 to brand 7,
but extends to a broader categorization of products and issues. Although
more research is needed in the area, it now seems that individuals are
more involved with issues. Overlooking this fact could exaggerate what
actually exists in the consumer's mind. Clear support is not given to
the intuitive feeling that the more expensive a product is, the more
important or ego involving it is to the individual. In fact, based on
this study, we would have to say that some other factor is accounting for
a large part of the variance.

The results of this study, to a great extent, conform to intuition.
Nonetheless, these results point out the absolute necessity of taking
into account the actual level of ego- involvement with a product or issue
if the investigator believes there will be a differential response to
communications based on the level of involvement with the topic of the
communication. Further, these results should serve as a call to reeval-
uate many of the studies on which communication theory is based.

TABLE 1

Mean Values for all Products and Issues#
(Ascending Order of Importance)
PRODUCTS ISSUES

Fraternity membership

Apollo flights

Lowering voting age to 18

Religious beliefs

Legalization of marijuana

Censorship

Grades

Legalization of abortion

Federal aid to education

Presidential elections

Sports

Cost of living

Racial equality in work,
housing and education

Birth control

Freedom of speech

Environmental pollution

World peace

Viet Nam war

Future occupational status

The draft

Mean for all issues

!!<

n

Facial tissues

1.19

21

Bicycle

1.39

23

Soup

1.52

21

Comb

1.65

23

Cola

1,81

21

Cigarettes

1.83

23

Portable typewriter

1.86

21

Toothpaste

1.95

21

Transistor radio

2.14

21

Coffee

2.61

23

Movie (in a theater)

2.67

21

Color television

2.83

23

Pants

2.91

23

Beer

3.00

21

Milk

3.09

23

News magazine

3.24

21

Bed

3.74

23

Meat

3.78

23

House

4.17

23

Automobile

4,52

21

Mean for all products = 2.59

# Range of possible values = 1 to 3
1 » no importance
8 « highest importance

X

n

2.38

21

2.91

23

3.48

23

3.71

21

3.76

21

3.95

21

4.17

23

4.48

23

4.56

23

4.78

23

4.81

21

5.09

23

5.17

21

5.57

21

5.62

21

5.67

21

6.17

23

6.28

21

6.43

23

6.71

21

- 4.

79

TABLE 2

Analysis of Variance
All Products and Issues

Source of Variacion S.S. D.F. M.S. F

Between All Products and All Issues 2030.3 39 52.06 26.27

Within Groups 1664.4 840 1.98

F. 01:40, oo= 1.59

FIGUEIE 1

On the circle diagram below, as the arrow moves FROM 'the outer circle TO
the central point, this indicates sweater degrees of IMPORTANCE in your
life. (KEEP IN MIND: YOU ARE CONSIDERING HOW IMPORTANT EACH ITEM IS
TO YOU.)

1. Please place the number of each item somewhere on the circle diagram,
that is appropriate for you.

2. Cross off each number after you place it on the diagram.

3. Stay within the outer circle.

\

\

\

V

i tii.;

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1. Cardozo, Richard N., "An Experimental Study of Customer Effort, Expec-
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2. Cohen, Joel B. and Marvin E. Goldberg, "The Dissonance Model in Post-
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3. Festinger, L. A., A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Stanford, Stanford
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4. Freedman, Jonathan L., "Involvement, Discrepancy and Change," Journal
of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 69(1964) p. 290-95.

5. Hovland, Carl I., "Reconciling Conflicting Results Derived From Exper-
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6. Hovland, Carl I., Irving L. Janis and Harold H. Kelley, Communication
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