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This study investigated retail influence on the decision making of both parent and child during the purchase of children’s casual‐wear clothing. Principally, it analyses the impact of influential agents on the buying outcome by examining the parent‐child relationship and the retailer influence in relation to need and motivations. By means of 100 parent and child questionnaires and one retail interview, it was concluded that parents were the most influential in deciding which clothes were bought, but children were found to exert a strong influence. The importance of branding to eight to ten year olds supports previous research in that it is closely correlated to peer pressure and the need to be accepted. Retailers were found to influence decision making mainly by the use of merchandise and branding to attract both children and parents. Recommendations for further research are discussed.

This chapter explores the ways in which academic educators’ experience of collaborative inquiry-based learning (IBL) can illuminate student behaviours, particularly in relation to assessment and the affective domain. The facilitator of this IBL, in the setting of academic staff development in UK Higher Education, uses a reflective storytelling style to detail the learning of an annual cohort of staff at a university in the north west of the United Kingdom. Six separate academic staff cohorts enroled in a unit, as part of a Master of Arts in Academic Practice, to undertake this experiential, humanist way of learning, working with all the principles of collaborative inquiry. The chapter explores the ways in which the participants’ self-reported affective responses altered over the course of the unit, particularly in relation to the assessment. Participant reflections are integrated with pedagogic literature and extracts from the facilitator’s contemporaneous notes, assessor’s feedback and other material, detailing the ways in which the freedom of an IBL episode moves to anxiety associated with assessment, which can build as the assessment point nears. Reflections on group constitution, cohort characteristics and the role of the facilitator are considered in relation to the notion of ‘success’ of IBL episodes. This is interrogated particularly in relation to academic staff responses to the experience of the emotions of IBL, and how this may affect their own practice in designing teaching and learning experiences for students in Higher Education.