This paper presents qualitative approaches to life course research and elucidates the benefits with data. While marketing research in general has gradually embraced the interpretive paradigm, the field of life course study in marketing has not widely enriched, fortified, or complemented their quantitative investigations with interpretive studies. Thus, this paper presents qualitative methods suitable for life course research. The paper reviews recent life course studies that employ qualitative methods. Data collection, analysis, and interpretation methods are addressed. Both benefits and limitations of the qualitative methods are discussed. We demonstrate how to apply and use the qualitative data to study life course issues and topics. As an illustration, we link a qualitative study of the gift giving of mature consumers in Japan to Moschis’ Conceptual Life Course Model and discuss the paradigmatic principles of life course theory. The paper concludes with opportunities for future research
JOURNAL OF GLOBAL SCHOLARS OF MARKETING SCIENCE 2020, VOL 30, NO 1, 60–75 https://doi.org/10.1080/21639159.2019.1613905 Qualitative approaches to life course research: Linking life story to gift giving Yuko Minowa a and Russell W Belk b a Business Department, Long Island University, Brooklyn, NY, USA; bKraft Foods Canada Chair in Marketing, Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY This paper presents qualitative approaches to life course research and elucidates the benefits with data While marketing research in general has gradually embraced the interpretive paradigm, the field of life course study in marketing has not widely enriched, fortified, or complemented their quantitative investigations with interpretive studies Thus, this paper presents qualitative methods suitable for life course research The paper reviews recent life course studies that employ qualitative methods Data collection, analysis, and interpretation methods are addressed Both benefits and limitations of the qualitative methods are discussed We demonstrate how to apply and use the qualitative data to study life course issues and topics As an illustration, we link a qualitative study of the gift giving of mature consumers in Japan to Moschis’ Conceptual Life Course Model and discuss the paradigmatic principles of life course theory The paper concludes with opportunities for future research Received 19 December 2018 Revised 30 December 2018 Accepted 10 February 2019 KEYWORDS Life course; qualitative research; research design; gift giving; mature consumers 关键词 生命历程; 定性研究; 研究 设计; 礼物给予; 成年消费 者 生命历程调查的定性研究: 将赠与礼物与生活故事相 联系 本文呈现了生命历程的质化研究, 并用数据阐明其好处° 虽然大体 上市场营销研究逐渐普及解释范例, 但是市场营销的生命历程研 究领域并非如此, 它质化的翻译研究并未广泛普及, 强化和赞扬° 因此, 这篇文章呈现了适合生命历程研究的质化方式, 回顾了最新 采用质化方式的生命历程研究° 文章强调了数据收集, 分析以及翻 译方式, 质化方式的优缺点都有提及° 我们演示了如何将质化数据 应用于生命历程问题和主题研究中去, 用一个质化研究作为说明: 将一位日本成年消费者向莫斯时斯的概念生命历程模型赠与礼物 相联系, 并讨论生命历程理论的范式原理° 文章以对未来研究提供 机遇而结束 Different generations live at the same time But since experienced time is the only real time, they must all in fact be living in qualitatively quite different subjective eras Karl Manheim (1929/1952, p 283) Human development is multifarious Grounded partly in sociologist Manheim’s (1929/ 1952) treatise on “The Problems of Generations,” a life course perspective posits variants in CONTACT Yuko Minowa yminowa@liu.edu 122, Brooklyn, NY 11201, USA © 2020 Korean Scholars of Marketing Science Business Department, Long Island University, University Plaza – Pratt JOURNAL OF GLOBAL SCHOLARS OF MARKETING SCIENCE 61 lived experience, interwoven with subjective and shared meanings, and the socio-historical context, that constitute the development of human lives in historical time In contemporary social science, the development of the field owes much to sociologist Glen Elder who postulated the paradigmatic principles of life course theory (Elder, Johnson, & Crosnoe, 2003; Giele & Elder, 1998) More recently, marketing scientist George Moschis has contributed to the advancement of the discipline with many influential articles and books, building on his earlier work on consumer socialization and consumer behavior of the elderly His most significant contribution is the introduction of the life course paradigm to marketing science, at a time when the discipline was still unaware about its possible contribution to marketing Moschis has advanced the knowledge of the discipline by applying the life course paradigm to consumer research and further developing the conceptual model (Moschis, 2007, 2012, 2019a, 2019b) Aside from the issues of generations, or cohorts, Manheim’s (1929/1952) thesis provokes another critical, and retrospectively prophetic argument: the value of quantitative versus qualitative studies, which he debates by comparing French positivist and German romantic historical studies The field of the life course study in marketing has been predominantly quantitative While it is not the dominant paradigm, the marketing research field has embraced the paradigm of interpretivism that stresses the multiplicity of subjective meanings in consumers’ lives, and the development of ideographic knowledge (Hirschman, 1986) In consumer research, this paradigm is now called consumer culture theory (Arnould & Thompson, 2005) Meanwhile, the community of the life course study in marketing has chiefly been engaged with the production of Cartesian objective, generalizable truth, although the use of qualitative methodology is suggested as appropriate to study people’s consumer behavior over the life course in general (Moschis, 2012) and in later life in particular (Moschis, 1991) The value of qualitative approach to the life course research seems manifold The approach of narrated lives, such as oral life histories, focusing on the interpretation of texts, expose the consumer’s identity and the self They provide a framework for understanding the consumer’s past life events as understood by the person and outline their account of their objectives and expectations Narrated lives also reveal a history of consumers’ shared beliefs and changing values, contextualized by their socio-historical backgrounds: they provide rich contextual information Also, narrated lives allow researchers to make analytical distinctions between causalities attributed to circumstances outside the consumer and those attributed to desires inside the consumer (Miquel Verd & López, 2011) Narrated lives can reveal voluntary and involuntary disruptions in consumers’ personal histories, which allow us to better understand the difference between transitions and turning points The objective of this paper is to present qualitative methods to life course research and elucidate the benefits while illustrating Moschis’ (2019a) Conceptual Life Course Model with qualitative data The remaining part of this article is organized as follows: First, we present qualitative methods suitable for life course research We then review recent life course studies that employ qualitative methods It is followed by discussions on data collection, analysis, and interpretation methods Second, we use qualitative data to demonstrate how to use the life story method to study gift giving of mature consumers in Japan while illustrating Moschis’ Conceptual Life Course Model and paradigmatic 62 Y MINOWA AND R W BELK principles of life course theory The paper concludes with opportunities for future research Qualitative approach to life course research Methods Methods suitable for life course research are the life story interview, life story self-writing, life grid method, longitudinal qualitative research, and other mixed methods, such as a combination of longitudinal biography and capability model employed by Miquel Verd and López (2011) Methods entailing narrated, oral life stories consist of several different types and nomenclatures, reflecting disciplinary focuses The life story interview is collecting of one’s story on his or her life The aim is to interrogate the subjective meanings of lives as they are told in the narratives of informants (Plummer, 1995) Life history interviews, the anthropologists’ term, are often treated synonymously with the life story interviews, although specific information sought may be different (Atkinson, 2002) Life review (Clausen, 1998) is referred to a recount of past experiences characterized by the resurgence of unresolved conflicts in the aged The term was originally meant for narratives elicited for a therapeutic program In life course research, it means life story that could occur at any time of life course and is elicited by the researcher rather than spontaneous recounts of life experiences Clausen (1998) regards life reviews and life stories are a subset of full life histories Regardless of the names, these methods are highly personal and highly contextualized Life story interviews can serve as an excellent way to understand how consumers see their own experiences, lives, and linked lives with others: they are not cold facts but memory of consumers' heart, their truth they live by Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, and Ziber (1998, p 2) define narrative research as “any study that uses or analyzes narrative materials” and classify it into four approaches based on two dimensions: (1) the unit of analysis, which is either holistic or categorical, and (2) the focus of analysis, which is either content or form of a story Thus, four approaches to reading a narrative based on the combination of the two dimensions are holistic-content approach, holistic-form approach, categorical-content approach, and categorical-form approach The holistic-content reading takes the whole life story into account while focuses are given on the content, such as emergent themes The holistic-form approach focuses the complete life story with focuses given on the structure, such as transitions and turning-points, based on chronological sequencing of life events The categorical-content approach focuses on the content of the life story as revealed in separate segments of the story The categorical-content approach is synonymous to the content analysis and can be quantified The categorical-form approach looks into the structural aspects of separate parts or categories of a life story Written life reviews, such as autobiographies and memoirs would be another form of a life story (Brown, 2006) They would reveal the informant’s own development and times But the usefulness of unsolicited written life reviews for research may depend on the author’s purpose They may not reveal profoundly the writer’s inner self or selfdevelopment, if the purpose is to entertain the reader Memoirs of public officials would JOURNAL OF GLOBAL SCHOLARS OF MARKETING SCIENCE 63 serve better to learn about historical events and institutional changes On the other hand, solicited autobiographies are an efficient way to collect life stories, as the researcher can guide some areas of life course to be focused in the content Written accounts allow the authors to readily review what they had written, be reflective, and revise and argument the original life stories Letters and diaries are sources of spontaneous expressions of the inner self Moreover, the accumulation of these records from the past aids the writer to retrieve recollections with the sequence of documented past events On the other hand, Miquel Verd and López (2011) explain benefits of qualitative approach, and life stories in particular, with the use of a mixed method: a combination of qualitative approach – longitudinal biography – and quantitative approach – the capability model that is concerned with a person’s capability to transform resources, rather than the amount of resources, into functioning With a study of the influences of social protection measures and resources on career paths, they illustrate how the capability model can be improved by using semi-structured interviews and a formalized qualitative analysis They admit that qualitative approach is useful for detecting critical events, turning points, transitions, and stages, in which social protection measures and resources play a critical role in guiding personal and career paths Research contexts: recent life course studies that use qualitative methods Benefits of qualitative approaches to life course research have been recognized in a wide variety of disciplines In sociology, aside from aforementioned Miquel Verd and López (2011), Cohler and Hosteler (2003) study intra-cohort variation in intimacy experiences of gay men in the last half century in America Their data on personal histories of single gay are used to explore interplay of sociohistorical context, individual subjectivity, and lived experience from young age to oldest age The life course research with qualitative approach conducted by Kõu, van Wissen, van Dijk, and Bailey (2015) is the intersection of sociology, economic geography, and population research: high-skilled migration based on lived experiences of Indians in the Netherlands It explicates various factors – labor market triggers, education, and family – through the life course on behavior of highly skilled Indian migrants By using in-depth interviews and visualization of parallel careers, they find the influence of linked lives mechanism on the structuring of migration trajectories In the intersection of sociology and education, Fehring and Bessant (2009) investigate why and how changes in aspirations in careers, such as pursuit for promotion and additional education, occur by college graduates for the 10 years following the completion of their initial degree The study uses interpretive approach and merits from rich insightful data generated by following the decision-making paths of informants as they progress through their working lives In psychology, Howes and Goodman-Delahunty (2014) use a qualitative method to identify career turning points and transitions of teachers and police officers By conducting the semi-structured interview, they apply contextualizing and categorizing methods to analyze the data They found that, unlike exit interview, life course approach allowed them to identify transition factors, and associated decision-making processes In gerontology, Cooper and Bigby (2014) study the life experiences of Australia’s aging population with long-term physical impairments, such as polio or cerebral palsy By 64 Y MINOWA AND R W BELK utilizing in-depth interviews and an inductive thematic analysis, they find the relationship between the impairment stages and cycles of adaptive strategies across life course phases Shifts in adaptive strategies at highly significant stages of their impairments are structured in a context of key social and policy events, such as rapid social changes and the tardy enforcement of anti-discrimination legislation In the intersections of gerontology, media studies, and sociology, Harrington and Brothers (2010) examine dual aging of actors who play long-term characters in soap opera and in their real life: actor’s use of their lines – fictional narratives – to make meaning of their own development through the life course By using open-ended semistructured interviews, they use grounded theory and a constant comparative method to analyze the transcribed text data They find that the actors in general experience a strong self-text connection that would manifest in their own personal trajectories Another interdisciplinary study using qualitative approach – retrospective interview – is by Schanke and Thorsen (2014); it is situated in the intersection of gerontology, psychology, and healthcare science They explore how aging people with disability strategically handle their “stigma” throughout the life course Their results show how stigma handling would evolve throughout one’s life to become refined, contextualized strategies exhibiting human resilience, as a reflection of human agency and struggles and strengths in managing adversity In consumer behavior, Minowa and Belk (2018) and Minowa, Matsui, and Belk (2012) employ qualitative approach to study romantic gift giving of mature consumers in their life course in Japan The details of these studies are discussed in the subsequent section of this article Aside from these works, there are a limited number of consumer studies that employ qualitative methods to address issues that can be viewed in the context of life course research (e.g Barnhart & Peñaloza, 2013; Schau, Gilly, & Wolfinbarger, 2009) We refer to Moschis’s (2019a) volume that provides reviews of these studies Data collection methods Depth interviews Depth interviews are the principal data collection activities of qualitative approach to life course research The depth interview excavates in-depth understanding of informants’ lived lives It is formal and often lengthy, lasting longer than one hour (McCracken, 1988) This requires aptitude and preparation by the interviewer Building rapport with the informant is indispensable for creating comfortable atmosphere for the interviewee to expose the inner self and reveal private life history Skills for interviewing and probing can be developed by practice As interviewing is a form of interpersonal communication, the interviewer should conduct it conforming to the interviewee’s culture and language if the study is cross-cultural Belk, Fischer, and Kozinets (2013) provide guidelines in conducing the depth interview The preparation for the interview includes obtaining permissions for the interview from the Institutional Review Board, recruiting informants, deciding on the time and location for the interview, setting up recording devices, and developing a set of questions for a semi-structured interview (Smith, 1995), or a protocol that is a list of topics The latter is used in a phenomenologically informed interview in which the interviewer does not have preset questions or follow a rigid order in asking questions In this type of JOURNAL OF GLOBAL SCHOLARS OF MARKETING SCIENCE 65 interview, the interviewee is no longer objectified, but becomes a collaborator of a communicative partnership (Fontana, 2002); it is more similar to conversation that encourages spontaneity (McCracken, 1988) The selection of interviewees is purposive: a sample of informants selected to match a set of criteria and the objective of the study Aside from operational aspects, it is also important for the interviewer to prepare mentally: position the self as relatively unfamiliar with the topic being studied and forget assuming being knowledgeable (Belk et al., 2013) The interviewer can collect the topical life story or the whole life story, depending on the focus of the study The interview can be also longitudinal or quasi-longitudinal Derived from life course sociology, longitudinal qualitative research is a study of the same people at multiple points in time (Hermanowicz, 2016) This method is appropriate for investigating developmental change in “real-time.” It enables researchers to understand how people successively make meaning about the trajectories of their lives Also, specific variants in human development and aging process are articulated more comprehensively by following them through time, while eliminating recall bias that would arise in retrospective life history studies Hermanowicz (2016) demonstrates the method by applying it to the study of the careers of academics from three age cohorts and in three different types of academic institutions, by interviewing the same people twice in a ten-year interval In the quasi-longitudinal interview, retrospective life story is collected Other retrospective approaches to gather time data include storytelling and retrospective anchoring and profusion (Otnes, Ruth, Lowrey, & Commuri, 2006) These suffer from recall bias (e.g telescoping, nostalgic glosses, forgetting, faulty memory) To overcome these shortcomings of recall bias, Harrison, Veeck, and Gentry (2011) propose life grid method for investigating lifetime consumer behavior It helps the recall of informants by linking details of the research question to other details of informants’ lives such as events in the family, community, and profession, as well as to historical events By using the life grid method, Harrison et al (2011) examine the changing family meals over the life course While the cueing mechanism aid informants to retrieve memories, it is impossible to know to what extent the narratives are reliable due to faulty memory or social desirability bias, common issues in oral history methods Ethnographic interviews Interviews can be conducted in conjunction with participant observation It is also possible to mix a variety of interviewing techniques, such as ethnographic interviewing and focus group interviews in addition to in-depth personal interviews Ethnographic interviewing is a particularly valuable method to understand consumer experiences since the interview setting in situ evokes the consumption experiences in the past and the present (Holt, 1997) In studying Jewish elderly migrants from Eastern Europe, Myerhoff (1978) uses ethnographic interviews She interviews members of Aliyah Center in the southern California in situ She interviews not only individually, but also by informants to narrate in a group in her Living History classes held in the Center In this way, she can observe the activities and interactions of the cohort of elderly Jewish residents – who are bound by their mother tongue, Yiddish – which aids her understanding of the context even more profoundly 66 Y MINOWA AND R W BELK Observation methods While interviews can be employed to interrogate the informant’s life history, its manifestation in actual, rather than reported, social behavior – group activities, conversations, and interactions – can be grasped by observation techniques (Angrosino, 2004) In observation methods, the researcher obtains the information by observing rather than communicating with the informant In participant observation, the researcher can directly observe interactions of elder people in person and in situ as Myerhoff (1978) did in her ethnographic research Observations are useful for understanding the informant’s habitus: ingrained and habitual behaviors, such as gait, manners, and body language, for which the informant may be unconscious or fail to recall as they are “automatic.” They are unspoken yet eloquent evidence of the informant’s social background and life history Projective methods Projective methods can be used with depth interviews Projection refers to “the tendency to imbue objects or events with characteristics or meanings which are derived from our subconscious desires, wishes or feelings” (Gordon & Langmaid, 1988, p 94) In projective methods, informants are placed in simulated activities in the hopes that they will disclose things about themselves that they may not reveal under direct questioning (Belk et al., 2013) The projective techniques include word association test, sentence completion (Belk, 1985), collage construction (Belk, Ger, & Askegaard, 2003), Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (Zaltman & Zaltman, 2008), and autodriving or visual elicitation (Heisley & Levy, 1991; Sayre, 2006) For life story that involves sensitive or embarrassing topics or socially desirable responses, projective techniques allow less self-exposing and hence less-threatening Projective methods that involve collage and picture drawing may be more suitable to informants who are not “verbal” in communication and feel more comfortable with communicating by creating visual images Data analysis and interpretation methods Analysis involves seeking patterns in data Qualitative data analysis should begin while collecting the data, and as it unfolds, additional or alternative questions may be addressed It is the basis of interpretation and theory building – a system of ideas or statements that explain some phenomenon (Bourdieu, 1977) In the following, we discuss two alternative data analytic and interpretive strategies Grounded theory method Grounded theory, originally developed by Glaser and Strauss (1967), is a systematic procedure for collecting and analyzing data that is “grounded in the behavior, words and actions of those under study” (Goulding, 2000, p 261) It also incorporates guidelines to verify and validate the findings and the development of theory, which help justify the trustworthiness of interpretive research The theory building is based on the incessant interplay between data collection and analysis of that data during the research process In preparing the analysis, the data that can be a combination of interviews, life histories, and introspection, should first be transcribed into texts The analysis begins with open coding – the process of reducing the data into distinct, non-autocorrelated units of meaning Here, the researcher identifies key words and phrases, or “a chunk or JOURNAL OF GLOBAL SCHOLARS OF MARKETING SCIENCE 67 unit of data (a passage of text of any length) that belongs to, represents, or being an example of some more general phenomenon” (Spiggle, 1994, p 493) in the informant’s account to the experience under interrogation Another important aspect of the grounded theory method is its sampling method of informants: theoretical sampling It is defined as “the process of data collection for generating theory whereby the analyst jointly collects, codes and analyzes the data and decides what data to collect next and where to find it, in order to develop the theory as it emerges” (Glaser, 1978, p 36) Thus, it is a kind of judgment sampling in which the additional informants are selected as the analysis unfolds and the theory emerges The “constant” comparative method is another trait of the grounded theory method: comparing similarities and differences across episodes in the data in order to find out if they belong to the same category and identify concepts (Spiggle, 1994) Such identification of concepts requires “axial coding” that entails the abstraction of coding descriptive episodes (i.e open-coding) onto a theoretical level (Goulding, 2000) After concepts are identified and their attributes are fully explored and their characteristics dimensionalized, the data are incorporated into a core category for the emergent theory If the researcher finds no new evidence from additional data, the study has reached the saturation, and the emergent theory is considered valid Abductive research strategy The grounded theory method (GTM), originated by Glaser and Strauss and discussed above, is objectivist in approach While Charmaz (2003) advanced GTM to constructivist grounded theory method, emphasizing informants’ construction of meanings based on their subjective experiences and feelings, it is still limited in terms of deriving new theoretical insights The constructivist approach based on symbolic interactionism regards actors as constructing meanings in their every interaction This approach, based on coding elicited articulations of constructed meanings is less likely to make leaps of interpretation using metaphors and interpretation because it sees meaning as emerging from increasingly abstract codes GTM – both objectivist and constructivist – rely on the researcher’s interpretation of articulated understandings (Ong, 2012) Abduction is an alternative It was posited by the philosopher Charles Peirce as a means for generating new theoretical discoveries: “Abduction makes its start from the facts, without, at the onset, having any particular theory in view, though it is motivated by the feeling that a theory is needed to explain the surprising facts” (Peirce, 1901/1998, p 106) Peirce states that abduction seeks theory, and, new truth comes only from abduction, although deduction and induction are used in constructing and testing hypothesis based on abduction In both philosophy and social sciences, abduction has come to bear multiple meanings (McKaughan, 2008) Abduction may refer to a “conceptual leap” (Klag & Langley, 2013): theoretical insights that emerge from the (well-prepared and well-read) mind of the researcher, instead of axial and selective coding of the qualitative data (Belk & Sobh, 2019) Following Peircian logic, the analytical process is to first find surprises, anomalies, and puzzles in the data (Minowa, Visconti, & Maclaran, 2012) The researcher then “steps back” from the data and asks, “what might this be an example of?” After a number of possible resolutions of these puzzles are generated, researchers then develop these points of view and test them against one another on the basis of their ability to account for these anomalies That is, in this approach (Belk & Sobh, 2019), the interpretation comes not from examining 68 Y MINOWA AND R W BELK and coding the data, but from the broadly prepared mind of the researcher It must be consistent with the data, but it does not emerge from increasingly abstract coding of the data Linking life stories to gift giving of mature consumers In this section, we use qualitative data to demonstrate how to use the life story method to study gift giving of mature consumers in Japan while illustrating Moschis’ Conceptual Life Course Model (Moschis 2019a, 2019b) and paradigmatic principles of life course theory (Elder et al., 2003) We highlight cases who experienced childhood trauma (e.g the loss of mother, the presence of militant father), and how those crises (stress and coping), and their socialization and personal development/decline, affected their subsequent choices at transitions and “turning points” (e.g selection of spouses, divorce) along with their selection of gift items to give and their desire to receive (materialism) The other crises in adult life include unemployment due to the long-term recession of national economy, and physical deterioration due to aging, both of which affected their value placed on human communication and hence gift giving The next section explains the informants, Baby Boomers in Japan, the global forefront of super-aged nation that has come to expect “the 100-year life” (Lewis, 2018) Baby boomers in Japan The baby boomers in Japan is referred to the people born from 1947 to 1949 Over eight million people were born in these years According to Dentsu (2007), in 2005, there were 6.7 million baby boomers, and combined with those who were born in 1950 and 1951, the population of this age segment exceeded 10 million people and occupied about 8.4% of the total population It was projected the baby boomers would comprise about one-fourth of the elderly population in 2015 They grew up during the post-war economic miracle and were exposed to the Western cultures due to the diffusion of mass media As a result, they are often characterized as self-expressive, individualistic, and informed consumers Unlike their preceding generations, their spousal relationship tends to be egalitarian These new values have manifested in their consumption practices at gift-giving rituals, including Valentine’s Day (Minowa, Khomenko, & Belk, 2011) They are a cohort that experienced the drastic economic and sociocultural changes in Japan Locating consumers in cohorts by approximately the same birth years (1947–1949) provides precise historical placement as this process links age to historical time This helps our analysis to maintain the same cohort and period effects, both of which are evidence of historical influences, although the historical experience of consumers in a cohort may be significantly diverse (Elder et al., 2003; Moschis, 2012) For the discussion on the significance of examining the romantic gift giving of baby boomer generation in Japan, see Minowa and Belk (2018) and therein Gift giving of mature consumers Research design and procedure Thirty informants (15 males) in Metropolitan Tokyo were recruited by a marketing research agency in 2010 and 2011 Occupations included retired former office worker, taxi driver, business owner, college student, and housewives Four Japanese researchers JOURNAL OF GLOBAL SCHOLARS OF MARKETING SCIENCE 69 conducted interviews with one informant at a time in a private office in downtown Tokyo The length of the interviews ranged from 60 to 75 Each was audio recorded and transcribed in English A pseudonym was assigned to each informant to guarantee anonymity A whole-to-part iterative strategy was employed for the analysis of the verbatim interview transcripts (Spiggle, 1994) Repeated ideas and similarities across the transcripts were analyzed utilizing the computer program NVivo We developed a holistic understanding of factors affecting the “storgic” later-in-life gift-giving orientations, where storgic love is characterized by caring, appreciative and empathetic companionate love (Minowa & Belk, 2018) Mature romantic gift-giving: Moschis’ conceptual life course model illustrated with the data The analysis of romantic gift giving based on a life-course perspective entails inquiry into a crossroad among psychological, sociological and anthropological assessments Issues related to the earlier-in-life gender and gift giving experiences in personal and family domains manifest in and shed new perspectives on romantic gift giving among mature consumers The impact of stressful experiences in childhood and adolescence on the orientation and practice of romantic gift giving is particularly prominent among those who struggle with forming a committed love relationship Effects of earlier-in-life gift and gender socialization experiences While conventional views of stress and coping focus on the present and recent past, life course researchers emphasize the chronic and acute stresses experienced over the lifetime and their cumulative impact (e.g Moschis, 2007, 2019a) At the same time, life course trajectories are altered by socio-cultural and historical context in which people are embedded, along with the timing of events and human choices that individuals make about their own lives The impact of non-normative stressful events related to gender and gift giving in childhood, divorce in adult life, or recollections of prior undesirable giftgiving experiences with intimate others cause disequilibrium, and the coping strategies to balance the disequilibrium and may lead to the development of behavioral changes that manifest in other consumer behaviors, such as materialism (Nguyen, Moschis, & Shannon, 2009) For example, Sachiko, a divorcee with a 15-year younger boyfriend, says: My mother passed away when I was years old and I moved to [live with my grand parents’ family] From about age to 10, no one ever celebrated my birthday or Christmas with me there may be some strong trauma from that So, I really have this need to have some celebration about these events with me, especially my birthday The trauma was exacerbated furthermore by a void of romantic gifts in her marriage and drove her to seek psychological compensation with romantic gifts throughout her adult life, the monetary value of which she uses to gauge the giver’s valuation of her worth, which also contributes to her perpetually low self-esteem I give something to [my boyfriend] because I want something in reciprocity through some objects, nothing too cheap one can feel love This may be an awkward way of saying, but I would like to confirm “How much can you spend [for a gift] for me?” 70 Y MINOWA AND R W BELK The literature on child bereavement suggests that early parental loss may have a significant long-term impact on relational and social development, which may manifest in the expectation for abandonment and painful separation, anxiety, social skill deficits, and low self-esteem (Biank & Werner-Lin, 2011) and depression especially for females (Forest, Moen, & Dempster-McClain, 1996) These consumers who experienced earlier-in-life traumatic events seem to exemplify the paradigmatic principle pertaining to the timing of events in life course theory: “The developmental antecedents and consequences of life transitions, events, and behavioral patterns vary according to their timing in a person’s life” (Elder et al., 2003, p 12) They revisit grief or trauma, renegotiate but never resolve disruptive childhood events, and continue pursuing ludic or pragmatic gifts, instead of storgic love and gift giving into later life They seem to be givers who try to compensate for past wounds with romantic escape We have termed these givers as “fantasy seeker” (Minowa, Matsui, et al., 2012) These consumers who have lived with earlier-in-life stresses and disruptions seem to exemplify the paradigmatic principle of life-span development in the life course theory (Elder et al., 2003, p 11): “Human development and aging are lifelong process.” Some informants seem to be “fantasy avoiders,” ambivalent givers who are afraid of commitment but need emotional support (Minowa, Matsui, et al., 2012) For instance, Manabu never learned how to be affectionate, but instead modeled himself after his dominant father and obedient mother who never exchanged gifts Parenting styles, especially of the father, failed to impart values for his son congruent with the rapidly changing cultural norms of the time (Barclay, 1980) Noboru, who came from “a very complicated family,” cannot form a committed relationship Only after his divorce, the stressful event in his adult life, did he start to send gifts to his alienated mother, the coping practice of which appears as the compensation for a void of agapic or storgic love with a committed romantic partner His love style with his girlfriends is, on the other hand, pragmatic “Affordability,” he says, is the criterion for selecting a gift, “because women want many things, [he] need to communicate the budget explicitly.” Thus, he takes women for shopping and buys what they want or gives them cash Children of divorce carry intense anxiety about intimacy into adulthood (Jones, Kramer, Armitage, & Williams, 2003) while family structure has been found to influence materialism (Moschis, 2007) Genealogy of gender domination The later-life storgic love and mature “perfect gift” experiences emerged in the narratives of informants classified as “reality adaptors” (Minowa & Belk, 2018; Minowa, Matsui et al., 2012) Some discussed euphoric memories of early-in-life gender and “perfect gift” experiences and family upbringing: their mother, grandmother, and female siblings appeared as socialization agents for romantic gift giving enculturation These influential women are uniformly praised in their narratives Yasuko hails her aggressive and nontraditional mother who once seduced a young student in Tokyo, later her father, and eloped to Kyoto; Jiro glorifies his “masculine” mother who imparted to him good values Instead of his mother, Taro had elder sisters who instructed him about buying an engagement ring for his fiancée in surprise, and more recently, his whimsical daughter who suggested sending a bouquet of flowers incognito to his wife for “a surprise.” From the gender schema theoretic perspective, daughters use mothers as drafters of gendered behavior and are influenced by their motherhood identities (Rittenour, Colaner, & Odenweller, 2014) In the Japanese sociocultural context, traditionally mothers are solely responsible – and JOURNAL OF GLOBAL SCHOLARS OF MARKETING SCIENCE 71 sacrifice themselves – for childbearing, and in particular sons’ maternal indulgence is a definitive facet of Japanese society (Adams, 2012; Iwao, 1993) These consumers’ giftgiving socialization and its manifestation in their later-in-life gift-giving practices seem to exemplify the principle of linked lives: “Lives are lived interdependently and socio-historical influences are expressed through this network of shared relationships” (Elder et al., 2003, p 13) On the other hand, patriarchal families with the presence of dominant father, veterans of WWII in particular, were invariably discussed negatively in informants’ narratives It is the kind of childhood stressful experience reported by the baby boomers in our study that is particularly relevant to their socio-historical context These consumer’s experience as a consequence of the war in Japan exemplifies the principle of time and place: “The life course of individuals is embedded and shaped by historical times and places they experience over their lifetime” (Elder et al., 2003, p 12) The disparity between anachronistic and terrifying militarism at home and liberated democracy outside home created a disjuncture for the baby boomer informants who were compelled to negotiate the ambivalence between oppression and emancipation – a contradiction of modern life The father’s stories of the atrocity he practiced on the battlefield or witnessing their domestic violence, caused a chronic stress for some female informants who could not escape from enacting the role of a proper daughter in the family These stressful experiences further affected subsequent events (Moschis, 2009a): their formations of intimate relationships and practices of romantic gift giving Here, the example of Mariko illustrates her anger that continues to manifest in her gift-giving practice: My father was domineering and military-like He did not allow me to wear red – as it stood out – like my husband discourages me too He did not permit me to marry the boyfriend in my youth I still keep a pendant from him who is now a peer of my husband I don’t discard the gift from my old flame as I feel it is a revenge to domineering men The quality of fathering during the daughter’s childhood and her later emotional well-being in adulthood are significantly related (Krampe & Newton, 2012) Wellfathered daughters are more likely to establish emotionally intimate, fulfilling relationships with men Conversely, daughters with insecure attachments to their fathers are more anxious and depressed In this regard, the father’s impact is often greater than that of the mother’s in forming a romantic relationship, although the bond between daughter (son) and mother is generally stronger (Iwao, 1993; Nielsen, 2014) While females are reported as more vulnerable to stressful events and poorer in dealing with coping strategies (Forest et al., 1996), readjustment by removing the stressor was a common coping strategy and successful for male boomers who left the family and became independent in their adolescence, or who found another paternal figure as a role model, as in the case of Hideo whose “father got drank frequently and acted violent to [Hideo’s] mother and made her cry.” These male informants subsequently married and have continued to practice empathetic gift giving with his wives: their coping strategies resulted in the human development (Moschis, 2009a) Concurrently, these cases seem to exemplify the paradigmatic principle of agency in life course theory (Elder et al., 2003, p 11): “Individuals construct their own life course through the choices and actions they take within the opportunities and constraints of history and social circumstance.” 72 Y MINOWA AND R W BELK Conclusion In this paper, we discussed qualitative approaches to life course research and highlighted the benefits As part of a “paradigm shift,” interpretive consumer research stresses socially constructed multiple truths and time-bound, context-dependent knowledge It has gained recognition as being critical in marketing research Nevertheless, the field of life course study in marketing has not widely embraced and practiced this critical approach This paper has argued for why qualitative methods will enhance life course research We reviewed recent life course studies that employed qualitative methods from various disciplines Data collection, analysis, and interpretation methods were addressed We explained how to apply and use the qualitative data – including life story interviews, observations, and projective techniques – to study life course issues and topics While outlining benefits, we also discussed the limitations of data collection method We discussed how different methods can be used together to complement shortcomings and enhance the effectiveness As an illustration, we linked a qualitative study of the gift giving of mature consumers in Japan to Moschis’ Conceptual Life Course Model and discussed the paradigmatic principles of life course theory Opportunities for future research are ample Longevity has dramatically increased over the past century, and increased life spans make for a longer life course What interpretive methods bring is the opportunity to understand changing life course issues from the elderly consumer’s point of view For example, is the handling of the indignities faced by nursing home residents related to their life course? Interpretive methods offer highly contextualized in-depth understanding about how their indignity is experienced Such understanding helps improve the delivery of care by providing practical implications for helping avoid unnecessary humiliation Japan provides instructive examples with their Respect for the Elderly Day and plated silver sake cups given to people who have reached their 100th birthday More qualitative research is needed to understand the special life course circumstances affecting increasingly long-lived people as well as cultural differences that may help understand long life in the East versus the West Thus, qualitative research methods augment life course by helping us understand life at all stages from the bottom up rather than from the top down Acknowledgments The authors gratefully acknowledge Takeshi Matsui for his administrative and data collection efforts and George Moschis and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors ORCID Yuko Minowa Russell W Belk http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7806-4034 http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6674-9792 JOURNAL OF GLOBAL SCHOLARS OF MARKETING SCIENCE 73 References Adams, K A (2012) Japan, the sacrificial society Journal of Psychohistory, 40(2), 89–100 Angrosino, M V (2004) Observational research In M S Lewis-Beck, A Bryman, & T F Liao (Eds.), The SAGE encyclopedia of social science research methods (Vol 2, pp 753–756) Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc Arnould, E., & Thompson, C (2005) Consumer culture theory (CCT): Twenty years of research Journal of Consumer Research, 31(4), 868–882 Atkinson, R G (2002) The life story interview In J F Gubrium & J A Holstein (Eds.), Handbook of interview research: Context & method (pp 121–161) Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Barclay, J R (1980) Values in adolescent males and father-son relations The Personnel and Guidance Journal, 58(9), 627–629 Barnhart, M., & Peñaloza, L (2013) Who are you calling old? 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BELK principles of life course