Me and my colleague are working on an experiment about how consumers value used products when primed with disease avoidance. In order to select two products for the experiments correctly, we need to establish, how "close" or "physically close" or "intimate" people are with different products.
For example, if you were to buy a used product, let's say (A) table, (B) bed, and you were concerned about getting infected, what measurement would you use to measure how "risky" consumers consider the products to be?
I greatly appreciate both suggestions for the right concept here as well as sources on the measurement on those concepts.
Since disease scare is likely a somewhat subjective judgment, I would recommend Q Methodology, which is a by-person factor analysis method rather than a by-variable analysis. (but I oversimplify)
Check out the community of researchers at https://qmethod.org, and consider joining the list-serve to pose this very question. However, the main process of capturing the operant subjectivity involves the participant sorting at least 40 statements (Q Sort) that are somewhat representative of either the group of interest, or theoretically representative of the idea of interest, or a little of both. It takes a fair amount of qualitative analysis of peoples opinions/reactions and/or the theoretical bases of the issue at hand.
One nice thing about the Q Method is that the software for doing its factor analysis is free and relatively easy to use, and there are a few options for delivering the Q Sort online rather than by hand using index cards. There are several books and a ton of peer reviewed articles that have deployed this methodology, as well as an increasing number of doctoral dissertations.
I've a attached a few papers that were easy to find on my computer that should give the gist.
There is a scale to measures Health Belief Treatment based on a Health Belief Model (HBM): Rosenstock IM, Strecher VJ, Becker MH. Social Learning Theory and the Health Belief Model. Health Educ Q. 1988;15(2):175–83. I believe that this scale and model is close to what you need. It measures the propensity of the patient to follow a medical treatment and it is somehow related to how much afraid he/she is to the disease.
We are working in a paper about the adaptation of this scale to patients with Diabetes Type 1.
Ville hi,
what I could generally watch in 'western' real life (e.g. second hand shops) is that clothing is generally well accepted, except underware i.e. clothing considered near to your skin, strangely not for socks.
As far as furniture and accessories (e.g. basket weaves) is concerned, imported products from Asia and Africa have to undergo a special procedure to kill germs. Do not know if these procedures imposed by customs are still valid. Anyhow I believe that furniture is considered less dangerous than clothing.
There are special cleaning procedures for goods that come from hospitals.
Retail shops consider freshly dry cleaned or washed textiles, appropriately packaged, as clean, independendly from considerations concerning germs and bacteria.
Hope this helps
All the best
Tony