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Housing consumption has been rising throughout the post-war era in Norway. However, at the end of the 1990s there was a decline in consumption among young age groups. This tendency is confirmed by newer data: consumption among younger households has stabilised at a lower level than used to be the case. Less of these households are owner-occupiers and they live in smaller dwellings compared to fifteen years ago.

In this paper the life course paradigm is used to explain these consumption changes. We find no signs of altering housing preferences among today's youth. The reduced housing consumption among this group can instead be seen in relation to new ways of organising the life course. Postponement of important life events such as completing one's education, entering the labour market, and starting a family of one's own will also postpone the point at which one becomes a homeowner for the first time. The observed decline in housing consumption among young household can, in other words, be understood as a delay in consumption. New life courses among today's youth entail new ways of adapting to the housing market.

This study aims to illustrate the viability of the life course paradigm (LCP), which is increasingly used by social and behavioral scientists to study a wide variety of phenomena, as a framework for studying the transformational role of service consumption in improving consumer well-being in later life.

The LCP is used to develop a life course model for studying the effects of service consumption on older people’s well-being. Previous research related to the consumption of specific types of services (financial and healthcare) is integrated within the multi-theoretical LCP to suggest relevant model variables and derive a set of propositions for illustrating the effects of service consumption on older adults’ well-being.

The research presented in this study shows how efforts to study the effects of service consumption on older people’s well-being can be improved by using the LCP, helps understand the onset and changes in service consumption patterns and illustrates an innovative way to study the role of services in promoting older consumer welfare.

By applying the principles and theoretical perspectives of the LCP, this study contributes to recent transformative service research efforts to better understand the impact of service consumption on people’s lives and the transformational role of services and service providers in improving consumer and societal welfare.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze consumer trust during a financial crisis, studying its antecedents and consequences. The perceptions of older and younger consumers are also compared.

The theoretical model of trust formation is tested on a random sample of 634 individuals from the three largest Spanish cities, Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, in a period of economic crisis. Structural equation models were used to verify the global hypothesized relationships. Additionally, the total sample was divided into two groups (younger and older consumers) in order to test the moderating effect of age in the proposed relationships.

In a period of financial crisis, older consumers’ trust is protected by an emotional and experiential shield from the effects of negative news in the surrounding environment. In contrast, trust, although important, is not the core variable for the younger segment, whose preferences are the consequence of a broad range of cognitive and emotional variables.

This research was carried out on financial services. Emotional, relational and experience-linked variables acquire greater importance as the individual gets older, in contrast to more cognitive evaluations. The difference between the younger and the older segments is that the cornerstone of older consumers’ attitudinal loyalty is trust, whereas for younger people, it is positive switching costs or rewards. Further research on the proposed conceptual model across different industries and countries is needed to determine the generalizability and consistency of the findings from this study.

This paper has significant managerial implications. The authors believe that the best strategy for a bank during a period of crisis is to follow a customer-friendly orientation, as in the case of banks that took a long-term vision to look after their brand image. The study draws banking companies’ attention to the importance of using age as a segmentation criterion.

Based on the life-course paradigm, a theoretical model of trust formation is performed. In a period of economic crisis, trust becomes the key variable in determining older consumers’ preferences.

This study aims to show how the increasingly popular life course paradigm (LCP) can be employed as an alternative to the successful aging perspective (SAP) as an overarching conceptual research framework to study elderly consumers' financial well-being.

A questionnaire was administered to a convenience sample of 804 Thai consumers over the age of 45 selected via the snowball method.

Significant results were found for hypotheses derived from the LCP for older consumers' financial well-being, suggesting critical roles of early life experiences, developmental factors, adaptation mechanisms and contextual factors.

This paper shows how efforts to study consumers over the course of their lives can be improved by utilizing the principles and theoretical perspectives of the LCP and offers research directions for studying not only older consumer well-being but also numerous consumer behavior issues at any stage of life in an innovative way.

Purpose: In this chapter, we develop a concept of social biographies which draws on social network and life course theories to examine how a diverse set of social relationships impacts health of sexual and gender minority (SGM) people over time.

Design/methodology/approach: We provide an overview of several decades of research on SGM people's social relationships, organizing this research within a social biographies framework.

Findings: We theorize about the importance of both the structure and content of SGM people's social networks for health, how these social relationships interact with each other, how these social biographies and their impacts shift across SGM cohorts and over the life course, and how they further are shaped by the intersection of a range of factors (e.g., race/ethnicity, social class).

Social biographies can remain constant or change over time, and relationships of all types and durations have the power to significantly improve or undermine health. This is in part because social ties both buffer and exacerbate the inimical effects of stress on health.

Originality/value: Traditional conceptualizations of relationships fail to reflect the diversity of relationships in SGM lives. Studying this diversity deepens our view of how social biographies influence health and how health inequities between SGM and cisgender and heterosexual (cishet) populations emerge. Studying social biographies of SGM people using theoretical and methodological tools from life course and social network perspectives reveals existing voids in the current literature, enabling researchers to better understand the shifting nature of social relationships in the twenty-first century.

Imbedded in the life course paradigm, the purpose of this paper is to investigate which individual life events impact blood donations and to study their underlying mechanisms.

By applying logistic regression, moderation and mediation analysis, this paper uses a large sample of N = 5,640 individuals.

Experiencing normative life events and stressful life events reduce the likelihood of donating blood, whereas human capital life events enhance the likelihood of donating blood. Specifically, having a child and death of a mother decrease and finishing education increases the probability of blood donations. Locus of control and satisfaction with income are significant underlying mechanisms.

Social marketing campaigns can use individual life events to focus on similarities between potential blood donors and individuals in need of blood. Blood centers can adopt their services to cater to the changing needs after experiencing individual life events by running mobile blood collecting drives and providing guidance.

Blood centers take an important role in sustaining a healthy society. As the need for blood will increase in the future, a better understanding of blood donation behavior and social marketing contributes to increased donations.

While previous research looked at collective life events, there is a dearth in marketing and blood literature on the effects of individual life events.

This study examined changes in work precarity (i.e., job insecurity and income insecurity) and involuntary job loss following the start of the Great Recession in 2007 among people with and without disabilities. Using five waves of nationally representative data from the Americans' Changing Lives (ACL) panel study, the findings demonstrated that people with disabilities who had early experiences of income insecurity were more likely to experience later income insecurity than people without disabilities. Those who had a functional disability and experienced job insecurity and income insecurity at W1, in 1986, were also significantly more likely to experience involuntary job loss following the start of the Great Recession. These findings highlight the disproportionate impact of early work precarity for people with disabilities and are discussed as an application of the life-course concept of cumulative disadvantage.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether the development of materialistic values in early life reflects cultural norms or is the outcome of media and family influences. It seeks to examine the role of family communication and television, which were found to promote materialistic values in individualistic countries, by assessing their effects on youths in four countries that represent the Eastern and Western cultures: Japan, Malaysia, USA, and France.

The study used an anonymous self‐administered survey of young adults aged 18 to 32 years in two diverse Eastern countries: Japan and Malaysia (total n=351); the sample size was approximately the same for the Western countries of USA and France (n=315). The samples were equivalent with respect to demographic characteristics. The Malaysian questionnaires were available in both English and Malay. Measurement scales included in the Japanese questionnaires come from available translated versions. The French questionnaires were subjected to back translation.

The findings suggest that the influence of the socio‐oriented family communication structure on materialistic attitudes in Western cultures might be indirect by affecting the youth's patterns of television viewing. The findings also suggest that concept‐oriented family communication has no effect on youth's development of materialistic values, regardless of cultural background.

The findings suggest that television might not be as important a socialization agent in the development of materialistic values of youths in collectivistic Eastern countries as it has been in individualistic Western countries

This study aims to examine the effects of earlier-in-life family events and experiences on the development of compulsive buying behavior in later life.

The study is based on data collected from a self-administered survey of 285 young Greek adults.

Young individuals appear to be particularly susceptible to their peers’ evaluations of consumption matters. However, those who experience family disruptions and have a low socio-economic status are least likely to communicate with their peers about consumer matters, possibly as a self-protection coping mechanism. Contrary to previous findings, family communication styles promote rather than deter the development of compulsive tendencies, suggesting the influence of other macro-environmental factors upon the development of young adults’ compulsive consumption tendencies.

Understanding the underlying mechanisms and contexts that promote the development of compulsive buying is imperative for deterring the onset of maladaptive consumption habits that have adverse effects on the individual and on society as a whole.

Using the multi-theoretical life course paradigm, this study highlights the links between earlier-in-life experiences and social contexts to the onset and development of compulsive behaviors. The findings could assist public policy makers and parents to use strategies that would educate and protect future generations from developing compulsive consumption habits.

The purpose of this paper is to examines the positive and negative impact of service provider experiences on the process of identity adjustment and how they can lead to subjective well-being (SWB). Due to increased life expectancies, people are experiencing major life events during aging (e.g. death of a spouse, serious disease and major health problems), events that lead to identity redefinition.

To gain more insight into this issue, a qualitative study was carried out that involved 37 in-depth interviews conducted with aging individuals who had experienced a major life event such as retirement and/or death of spouse. To apprehend the diversity of consumption situations, the authors investigated daily consumption, hedonic consumption and imposed services (e.g. health and funeral services) due to life events.

The findings suggest that service providers influence consumer’s SWB as regards relationships, growth and purpose in life, mastery and independence and self-acceptance.

The contribution indicates that services play a role in maintaining and/or creating SWB. By segmentation through social roles and facilitating access to services, providers must take into account the processes of normalcy and abandonment (déprise) among aging consumers in life transitions. They must also ensure that they support consumers with the lowest human capital (skills, level of education, income and social class).