Understanding Compulsive Buying Among College Students: A Hierarchical Approach

Borrowing from Allport (1961), we propose a hierarchical approach in which cardinal psychological traits predict central traits, which in turn predict surface traits. The hierarchical perspective was employed to investigate the surface trait of compulsive buying among college students—a growing problem at U.S. universities. In Study 1, traits from the Five‐Factor Model of personality were employed as cardinal traits, the needs for arousal and for materialism were employed as central traits, and compulsive buying was the dependent variable. Structural equation modeling was employed to find the best fitting model, which accounted for 19% of the variance in compulsive buying. In Study 2, this model was confirmed and accounted for 28% of the variance in compulsive buying. Implications for theory and for understanding compulsive buying are identified.