ABSTRACT
The international social scientific research on consumption and consumers is such a wide and interdisciplinary field that it is almost a mission impossible to construct an overview of all the different approaches to methodological design and use of methods applied within the field, which range from highly quantitative consumer behaviour analysis to deeply qualitative ethnographic consumption process studies. This chapter builds upon the insights of these and other relevant overview publications as well as a systematic search for methods' debates in nine journals for consumption research. It focuses on the four rough groupings of consumption research around which the methods' descriptions and discussions are organized. They are Consumption as behaviour, Consumption as identity, Consumption as cultural dynamics and Consumption as part of social configurations. The chapter describes the typical methodological strategies of each of the four groupings in consumption research.
