An Investigation of the Relationship Between Perceived Risk and Product Involvement

ABSTRACT - The constructs of perceived risk and product involvement have been noted to share several similarities in the consumer behavior literature but diversity in the conceptualization and operationalization of these constructs has led to conflicting and confusing findings. Using consistent definitions of the two constructs, this article investigates the relationship between their components. Results support the multi-dimensional and product-specific nature of the perceived risk construct. Additionally, the perceived risk dimensions are found to explain a significant portion of the enduring importance component of product involvement. Suggestions for future research are provided to build on these findings.

Citation:

Utpal M. Dholakia (1997) ,"An Investigation of the Relationship Between Perceived Risk and Product Involvement", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 24, eds. Merrie Brucks and Deborah J. MacInnis, Provo, UT : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 159-167.

Advances in Consumer Research Volume 24, 1997      Pages 159-167

AN INVESTIGATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PERCEIVED RISK AND PRODUCT INVOLVEMENT

Utpal M. Dholakia, University of Michigan

[The author would like to thank Professor Aaron Ahuvia and three anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper.]

ABSTRACT -

The constructs of perceived risk and product involvement have been noted to share several similarities in the consumer behavior literature but diversity in the conceptualization and operationalization of these constructs has led to conflicting and confusing findings. Using consistent definitions of the two constructs, this article investigates the relationship between their components. Results support the multi-dimensional and product-specific nature of the perceived risk construct. Additionally, the perceived risk dimensions are found to explain a significant portion of the enduring importance component of product involvement. Suggestions for future research are provided to build on these findings.

INTRODUCTION

The constructs of perceived risk and product involvement have been extensively used as moderating or explanatory variables in consumer behavior. A significant number of papers have examined the conceptualization, importance and relevance of each construct and its relationship to important consumer behavior phenomena [For excellent reviews of the involvement construct, see Laaksonnen (1994), Muehling et al. (1993) and Zaichkowsky (1985); for reviews of perceived risk, see Dowling (1986) and Gemunden (1985).]. The level of involvement has been shown to determine the depth, complexity and extensiveness f cognitive and behavioral processes during the customer choice process (Houston & Rothschild, 1978; Laurent & Kapferer, 1985). In the marketing literature, the amount and nature of risk perceived by the customer during purchase has been recognized as important in defining the customer’s information needs and in predicting the acquisition, transmission and processing of information during the decision-making process (Gabbott, 1991). These similarities are striking and suggest the need for an investigation of the relationship between the two constructs. An investigation of the relationship has the potential to isolate elements common to the two constructs as well as to explicate the relationship between their components.

Though several researchers have noticed and discussed this relationship (e.g.: Laurent & Kapferer, 1985; Richins, et al., 1992; Venkatraman, 1989), no study has made an explicit distinction between the elements of these constructs and compared them simultaneously for a number of different product classes. The main objective of the present study is to fill this gap in extant literature and investigate the relationship between product involvement and perceived risk. The constructs of perceived risk and product involvement are reviewed and the relationship between particular types of risk and the components of product involvement is investigated. Hypotheses relating to the two constructs are formed and an empirical study is carried out using a recent data-collection advance to test the hypotheses. The paper concludes with a presentation of results of the study along with a discussion of implications from the findings.

PRODUCT INVOLVEMENT

The current view in consumer behavior holds involvement to be a causal or motivating variable influencing the consumer’s purchase and communication behavior. According to this view, the level of involvement determines the extensiveness of the consumer’s purchase decision-making process as well as the nature of processing of communications (Laurent & Kapferer, 1985).

Like other consumer researchers, I view product involvement as a motivating condition, defined as "the perceived personal relevance of a product to an individual, based on inherent needs, values and interests" (Antil, 1984; Celsi & Olson, 1988; Richins & Bloch, 1986; Slama & Taschian, 1985; Zaichkowsky, 1985). This definition falls within the domain of cognitive approaches to defining involvement (Laaksonnen, 1994), where involvement is treated as a property of an object-related cognitive structure, specifically either an attitude structure or a product-related knowledge structure. The level of involvement is determined by the number of personal needs, goals and values (self-knowledge) engaged by the product, the centrality of this self-knowledge to the individual and the relatedness of the product to this self-knowledge (Celsi & Olson, 1988; Tyebjee; 1979). This kind of product involvement is long-lived, determined by the stable elements of the individual’s identity and is therefore labeled enduring involvement (Laaksonnen, 1994).

The emphasis of enduring involvement is on the product itself and the value or need satisfaction derived from owning, using and consuming the product (Richins & Bloch, 1986). Each person has a different cognitive structure for different product classes and enduring involvement can be conceptualized as representing the strength or extent of this cognitive structure. Thus in this study, product involvement is conceptualized as specific to a product-class and unique to an individual. However, at the aggregate level, fairly homogeneous perceptions of products are found, especially in relatively homogeneous populations. As a result, it is possible to aggregate perceptions of enduring involvement for a product class for more-or-less homogeneous populations.

Within the extensive marketing literature, two other conceptualizations of involvement can beidentified. Situational involvement refers to the degree of involvement evoked by a particular purchase situation and is essentially context-dependent and temporary (Houston & Rothschild, 1978). Response involvement is concerned with the consequences of the product on the individual in terms of his/her cognitive response and is outcome-oriented (Richins, et al., 1992).

PERCEIVED RISK

Perceived risk is conceptualized as arising from unanticipated and uncertain consequences of an unpleasant nature resulting from the product purchase (Bauer, 1960). In consumer behavior literature, when evaluating risk, the focus is generally on potentially negative outcomes and perceived risk is generally conceptualized in terms of loss (Dowling, 1986), in contrast to other disciplines like psychology where both positive and negative outcomes are considered.

Bettman’s (1973) distinction between inherent risk and handled risk identifies perceived risk as a product-class specific construct, i.e. different product classes have different levels of inherent and handled risk associated with them. The inherent risk refers to the aspects of risk in the product class that are temporally stable while the handled risk pertains to the more situational aspects of the product class. In this study, I adhere to this conceptualization of perceived risk as product-class specific and unique to an individual. In other words, each individual perceives each product class to have specific levels of risk associated with it and these levels for a product class are different for different individuals. Perceived risk for a particular product class is defined as "the subjective expectation of losses" resulting from the purchase and use of products from the product class. This definition is consistent with definitions used in previous studies (e.g.: Peter & Ryan, 1976).

EXHIBIT 1

CATEGORIES OF LOSS CONTRIBUTING TO PERCEIVED RISK

Perceived risk studies have identified several distinct dimensions within the overall perceived risk for a product-class (Jacoby and Kaplan, 1972; Kaplan et. al., 1974; Roselius, 1971). The risk taxonomy arising from these studies and consisting of six dimensions is widely accepted as relevant to explaining perceived risk and is presented in Exhibit 1.

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PERCEIVED RISK AND PRODUCT INVOLVEMENT

A significant similarity between the two constructs is that both perceived risk and product involvement incorporate the notion of "importance" of a product class to a consumer. The notion of perceived risk as the probability and magnitude of loss arising from the purchase and use of a product relates to the anxiety felt by the consumer when dealing with a particular product class and consequently the importance of the product class to the consumer. The importance of the product class is an integral component of the enduring involvement construct from its definition as "the extent of connections of a product class to a person’s self-concept, values and motives" (Engel & Light, 1968). The origin of the notion of importance can be traced to the "importance of purchase" construct in the Howard and Sheth (1969) model of buyer behavior. In this model, the "importance of purchase" is defined as the relative intensity of motives that govern the buyer’s activities relating to the given product class relative to other product classes. The authors note that the construct has been termed degree of involvement, importance of purchase, importance of the task or seriousness of the consequences. This construct reveals the intimate links between the two constructs.

Another similarity is that high levels of both perceived risk and product involvement are known to result in more extensive informaion gathering and more elaborate information processing by the consumer (Celsi & Olsen, 1988; Gemunden, 1985). A third similarity is the great diversity and confusion prevailing in both involvement and risk research, prompting one risk researcher to label the construct "fuzzy" (Dowling, 1986). As a result, an explicit definition of the construct is generally specified in a study to clarify and delimit the scope of the study when using either of these constructs. In the present study, conceptualization of both perceived risk and enduring involvement as product-class specific and individual-level constructs facilitates their comparability.

However, there are significant differences between the two constructs. At the broadest level, the distinction between product involvement and perceived risk can be made using the fact that perceived risk considers only the negative consequences arising from the purchase and consumption of the product while the level of product involvement is affected by the positive consequences also. Moreover, involvement also includes characteristics like ego-involvement and commitment (Muehling et al., 1993) which are not related directly to risk associated with the product.

In studying the relationship between the two constructs, the extant literature reveals confusion about whether perceived risk should be treated as an antecedent of involvement (Bloch, 1981), one of its dimensions (Laurent & Kapferer, 1985) or as its consequence. Several studies provide evidence that perceived risk influences situational involvement. Bloch (1981) suggests that situational involvement is experienced by consumers when the stakes associated with a purchase outcome, and consequently the perceived risk is high. This involvement is likely to be temporary and disappear when the purchase is completed. In their development of a standard scale, Laurent and Kapferer (1985) use perceived risk as an antecedent of situational involvement. They find no discrimination between the "perceived importance of a purchase" and the "perceived importance of the negative consequences of a mispurchase" and combine these constructs into a single one. However, they find the subjective probability of a mispurchase to have discriminant validity and conclude that involvement cannot be equated with perceived risk.

Perceived risk has also been used as a dimension of product involvement. Rothschild (1979) advocates the use of perceived risk as an implicit measure of product involvement and points out the usefulness of functional and psychological risk as predictors of product involvement. In their scale development procedure, Chaffee and McLeod (1978) observe that risk perception provides an empirical definition of the general concept of involvement. Bloch and Richins (1983) suggest that instrumental involvement differs from the importance dimension of risk only in that the latter is a "cognitive" state of awareness that the purchase of a product has negative consequences while instrumental involvement also comprises the "motivation" to act on these consequences by avoiding them during purchase.

Interestingly, perceived risk has also been envisioned as a consequence of product involvement. Venkatraman (1989) suggests that since enduring involvement is a long-term product concern while perceived risk is limited to the purchase situation, enduring involvement precedes risk. She finds evidence of low perceived risk for consumers with high enduring involvement and concludes that enduring involvement increases the risk-handling capabilities of consumers. Investigating the applicability of the "availability heuristic," Folkes (1988) finds that the ease of retrieval of product performance experiences from memory (associated with high levels of product involvement) influences consumers’ judgments about the likelihood of product failures. Thus, perceptions of risk are found to result from salience of the product to the consumer. This ambivalence about the relationship suggests a need for a systematic study examining the components of the two constructs and the relationship between them.

HYPOTHESES

In the present study, the construct of perceived risk is characterized as multi-dimensional. These dimensions have been considered to be functionally independent at a conceptual level so that for an increase in one category of risk, the other risk categories can increase, decrease or remain unchanged. Support for the multi-dimensional nature of the perceived risk construct has been well-documented in literature (Jacoby and Kaplan, 1972; Stone and Gr÷nhaug, 1993) and these dimensions have been found to explain a significant portion of the overall risk construct. However, the influence of a particular dimension in contributing to the overall risk is likely to be different for different products. For example, the physical risk associated with a chain saw is likely to be a more significant contributor to the overall risk than the physical risk associated with a CD player. It is therefore essential to determine if the six components of risk together explain a significant portion of the overall perceived risk for different product classes. Previous studies have measured this relationship for multiple products using single measures for each risk category (Jacoby & Kaplan, 1972) or for a single product using multiple measures to measure each category (Stone & Gr÷nhaug, 1993). It is of theoretical importance to extend this relationship using multiple measures across different product classes. If the six dimensions of risk are correctly chosen and measured properly, they must explain a significant portion of the overall perceived risk across product classes. The first hypothesis can therefore be stated as:

H1: The six dimensions of risk will explain a significant portion of the overall risk across different product classes.

Enduring involvement for a product class arises from the importance of purchase, ownership and use of the product to the consumer. Thus, perceptions of enduring importance result from the product’s ability to satisfy the consumer’s enduring needs (Bloch & Richins, 1983). The nature of the product plays an important role in determining the product importance perceptions. Thus, though enduring importance for a product is conceptualized as a person-specific variable, I expect that at an aggregate level, different product classes will differ in the level of enduring importance associated with them. Support for this has been found in previous studies. For example, Hupfer and Gardner (1985) found that products differ in the perceived importance to consumers, with cars perceived as more important than facial tissues. As a result, the hypothesis can be stated as:

H2: At an aggregate level, the enduring importance component of product involvement for different product classes will be different.

The enduring importance construct is a key component of involvement. It is the long-term, cross-situational perception of product importance based on the strength of the product’s relationship to the central needs and values of the consumer (Bloch & Richins, 1983) and reflects a cognitive state of awareness about the product (Laaksonnen, 1994). The strength of this tie influences the level of importance and consequently, that of enduring involvement felt by the consumer. The enduring importance for a product class is determined to a large extent by the perceived importance of the consequences resulting from using the product. The "adverse consequences" dimension of perceived risk is concerned with the severity of negative consequences that can ocur from the purchase and the use of the product (Dowling, 1986). For products with the possibility of severe adverse consequences, the need for knowledge, awareness and expertise will be greater and consequently enduring involvement for such product classes will be higher. Products with high levels of perceived risk will therefore have high levels of perceived importance associated with them.

I also expect that the risk dimensions will play a different role in explaining enduring importance for different product classes. For example, social risk is likely to be more useful in determining enduring importance for a designer dress while physical risk is likely to be more pertinent for a chain-saw. As a result, the hypothesis can be stated as:

H3: The six dimensions of perceived risk will explain a significant portion of the enduring importance component of product involvement across different product classes.

These hypotheses summarize essential properties of the two constructs and explain the relationship between their components.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

To examine the preceding hypotheses, primary data was collected because of the lack of appropriate secondary data availability. A new method of data collection called electronic mail was used, made possible due to recent advances in technology and rapid proliferation of the facility. Electronic mail (e-mail) uses computer text-editing and communication tools to provide a high-speed message service over the Internet. Some important characteristics of e-mail that make it an attractive data-collection device for consumer research are speed of response, reduced costs of sending and receiving surveys, possibility of asynchronous communication between the researcher and the respondent(s) and the absence of intermediaries (Sproull, 1986).

Measurement

Standard scales were used to measure the constructs of perceived risk and product involvement [the questionnaire used in the study can be obtained from the author on request.]. This gave the assurance of previously tested validity and reliability and reduced the time for questionnaire construction and pre-testing.

EXHIBIT 2

THE EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN

Early studies of perceived risk relied on single measures for each risk dimension. Recent studies, however favor the use of multiple measures for each dimension (Stone & Gr÷nhaug, 1993). For the present study, each risk dimension is measured using multiple items and separate measures are used for the measurement of the overall risk. The scale used is similar to that used by Stone & Gr÷nhaug (1993).

The Components of Involvement (CI) Scale (Lastovicka and Gardner, 1979) was used to measure product involvement. Several reasons dictate the choice of the CI scale for the present study. The CI scale was constructed to measure enduring involvement for a product class. It is one of the earliest multi-item scales developed to measure involvement and forms the conceptual basis for subsequent scale development in the field. The CI scale is not product-specific and can be applied across product classes. It is based on the conceptual foundations of involvement (e.g.: Sherif & Cantril, 1947) and not only emphasizes the self-identity/ importance component of involvement but also captures the notion of ego-involvement (Sherif et al., 1965). Previous studies have shown the CI scale to have adequate levels of content, convergent and discriminant validity (Lastovicka & Gardner, 1979; Jensen et al., 1988).

Products

To incorporate heterogeneity of product classes, a 2x2 between-subjects experimental design with two levels of cost (high an low) and two levels of importance (high and low) was used to test the hypotheses. Products were chosen for each of the four cells using criteria of cost, end-use and durability. The four products chosen were: laptop computer, color television, greeting card and can of soup. [The products were chosen by carrying out a pre-test. Thirteen subjects (all graduate students) were asked to rate several different products on the dimensions of importance and cost. The four products were chosen on the basis of these evaluations.] The diagrammatic representation of the experimental design is presented in exhibit 2.

Data Collection

The data collection was carried out using a three-stage procedure. In the first stage, forty mailing lists were randomly chosen from all the listserv mailing lists. [Mailing lists are groups of people sharing some common interests and communicating with each other by e-mail. A message sent to the mailing list server is distributed to all subscribed members of the mailing list.] In the second stage, in accordance with "netiquette," letters were sent to list-owners asking permission to post a short solicitation message on the list. Messages requesting list members interested in filling out surveys to respond along with a brief description of the study were sent to the 27 lists whose owners gave permission. Seventy-eight responses were received. In the third stage, entire surveys were sent to these respondents resulting in seventy-two completed surveys. The response rate [This response rate is not comparable to the conventional response rate reported for mail and telephone surveys, since only people soliciting the questionnaire are considered as potential respondents.] was 92.3%.

Respondent Characteristics

The respondents were almost equally distributed by gender. Of the 72 respondents, 38 (52.8%) were male and 34 (47.2%) female. The mean family income was $54970 and the mean age was 34.7 years. The respondents belonged to several occupational categories, the major ones being 40 (55.56%) professionals, 17 (23.61%) graduate students and 10 (13.89%) faculty. No claim of representativeness is made for the sample used in the study because of the fairly homogeneous, high socio-economic status of the respondents in the sample. But since the research goal is synonymous to Calder et al.’s (1981) theory testing, the sample is appropriate for the present study.

RESULTS

A reliability analysis was carried out to test the reliability of the constructs used in the measurement of dimensions of perceived risk and the components of product involvement. Table 1 reports the Cronbach alpha values for each of the measured constructs. All the constructs satisfy the Nunnally Cronbach alpha criterion of 0.7 (Nunnally, 1978).

TABLE 1

RELIABILITY ANALYSIS FOR THE MEASURED CONSTRUCTS

To determine the relatedness to the dimensions of risk, the correlations were computed. [Due to space constraints, the correlation matrix is not presented here but can be obtained from the author on request.] All six risk dimensions had high positive correlations with the criterion overall risk and also had significant positive correlations with each other. To test hypothesis 1, a multiple regression of all the dimensions of perceived risk was carried out with the overall risk as the dependent variable. Table 2 reports the results of the analysis. Time risk and financial risk are found to be significant predictors of the overall risk. For the full model, 84.3% of the total variance in the overall risk is explained using the six dimensions of perceived risk. In general, the six dimensions of risk perform extremely well in predicting overall risk for different product classes.

The generalizability of the predictive power of the six dimensions was tested by carrying out multiple regressions for each individual product class. These results are reported in table 2. Financial risk is found to be significant for laptop computer and color television. This is consistent with the research design where these two products were chosen as high cost products. None of the other predictors are found to be significant for any product class. The adjusted R-square values vary from 0.82 for a greeting card to 0.34 for a can of soup. A reason for the low R-square value for the can of soup could be that the product has very low overall perceived risk associated with it and it is difficult to distinguish that overall risk into distinct types. In general, the six dimensions of perceived risk predict the overall perceived risk across different produt classes and hypothesis 1 is supported.

The mean enduring importance values along with standard deviations for the four product classes are presented in table 3. To test hypothesis 2, a one-way ANOVA was carried out and the results are reported in table 4. The results of the F-test indicate that mean values are different between product classes and the enduring importance depends on the product class under consideration. As a result, hypothesis 2 is supported. Pair-wise comparisons using the Tukey multiple-comparison procedure showed that can of soup has a significantly lower enduring involvement than each of laptop computer, color television and greeting card at the 95% family confidence interval.

To test hypothesis 3, multiple regressions were carried out with the six dimensions of risk as the predictor variables and enduring importance as the dependent variable. Table 5 reports the results of this analysis for all product classes. Almost 43% of the variance in the enduring importance variable is explained by the dimensions of perceived risk for the full model. This indicates support for the hypothesis that the dimensions of perceived risk are useful in predicting importance for a product class. I carried out a separate analysis to test the generalizability of this hypothesis across product classes. Table 5 reports the results of separate multiple regression analyses for different product classes. The R-square values vary from 0.6755 for color television to 0.0235 for a can of soup. These results provide support for the suitability of the perceived risk dimensions in predicting enduring importance.

DISCUSSION

In general, the six dimensions of risk are found to be comprehensive determinants of the overall perceived risk construct. One contribution of this study is the generalizability of this relationship across different products using multiple items of measurement. The perceived risk construct is useful when there is a certain degree of risk in the product. For a product like a can of soup for which the perceived risk is extremely low, there is some doubt of the usefulness of attempting to distinguish the dimensions of risk causing the total amount of risk. Results of the study indicate that the dimensional approach to measurement makes most sense when there is a certain amount of inherent risk present in the product class. Therefore, the conclusion reached is that the conceptualization of perceived risk as a multi-dimensional construct is a sound one and the use of multiple items to measure each of the dimensions is appropriate.

TABLE 2

REGRESSION MODELS FOR PERCEIVED RISK

TABLE 3

MEANS OF ENDURING IMPORTANCE FOR PRODUCTS

It has been noted that one of the earliest and most accepted axioms of consumer behavior theory is that at an aggregate level, consumers consider different products to have different levels of importance (Bloch & Richins, 1983). This study confirms the truth of this axiom for enduring importance associated with products. Another important contribution of this study is that it raises and addresses the issue of the temporal nature of the perceived risk construct. There is some ambiguity about the time-variance and the stability of the risk perceived by a consumer for a product class. Most researchers do not make an explicit assertion but implicitly assume perceived risk to be a situational construct, largely determined by the conditions during the purchase occasion.

The dimensions of perceived risk are also ambiguous in making this distinction between the enduring and the situational elements of risk. However, most of the dimensions are related to losses occurring because of product attributes and therefore represent stable perceptions. Also, most of the losses represented by the risk dimension have the same relative importance with respect to each other over time. As an example, for a person interested in fashion clothing, the social and psychological risk associated with the poduct class "clothing" will be significant, time-invariant and relatively stable. In other words, this consumer will have a high amount of social and psychological risk for the product class, every time s/he deals with the product class. The results of this study provide some evidence of the enduring nature of the risk dimensions.

TABLE 4

ONE WAY ANOVA FOR ENDURING IMPORTANCE BY PRODUCT

TABLE 5

REGRESSION MODELS FOR ENDURING IMPORTANCE

This study also raises the question of the need for a separate conceptualization of the situational perceived risk construct and an examination of the components of this construct. Future studies must address the issues of scale construction and relatedness of this construct to other constructs like instrumental importance (Bloch & Richins, 1983) and situational involvement.

Another important contribution of the study is the success of the perceived risk dimensions in explaining the enduring importance component of product involvement. While this has significance, the result also raises important issues for future research. It is possible that some risk dimensions are antecedents of enduring importance while others are consequences of it. For example, psychological and social risk could result in high enduring importance for champagne for a wine connoisseur, which in turn could result in high performance risk. Future studies should focus on unraveling this causal relationship. The effect of different levels of situational and enduring involvement on perceptions of different types of risk is another promising area for future investigation. Finally, given the high socio-economic status of the subjects in the present study, future replications with different subject pools may also prove to be valuable.

CONCLUSIONS

In this study, a systematic measurement and comparison of perceived risk and enduring product involvement has been made. This study makes several contributions to existing knowledge about the two constructs. First, it extends the generalizability of a multi-item, multi-dimensional approach to the measurement of perceived risk across product classes. Secondly, some support for the enduring nature of the perceived risk construct as characterized by its dimensions is found. Third, the findings from the study suggest the presence of a relationship between the dimensions of perceived risk and the enduring importance component of product involvement. The conclusion drawn is that perceived risk and product involvement though related are distinct constructs and concurs with Laurent and Kapferer (1985) that "involvement cannot be equated with perceived risk."

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