The Effects of the Children Under 8 Years Old on Their Families’ FoodPurchasing Decision

Family factor, one of the social factors affecting the purchasing behavior, is regarded to be the most important factor giving direction to the purchasing decisions. In every period of the life, the consumption patterns of an individual cannot be isolated from his/her family‘s consumption patterns. The reason why the present study is limited to the foods is that children are the direct consumers of foods and foods have an important portion in the consumption expenditures of families. And the reason why an upper age limit (8 years old) is set up for the study is that this age is considered to be transition to having purchasing decisions on their own. In the field work, food purchasing was divided into sub-categories because the study aims to reveal the extent to which children affect purchasing decisions in each sub-category. Moreover, for each sub-category, other factors that can affect the purchasing decisions and that are not related to children were also investigated, in this way, the real influence of the children is expected to be found. As purchasing decision is a qualitative data with two possibilities, there can be many independent variables that have the potential for affecting dependent variable; therefore, here ―sequenced logit model‖ will be used to evaluate the findings of the study.