Abstract:

Several recent studies in social psychology, organizational behavior, health research and in most of the social sciences have utilized facet theory as a metatheoretical framework to design models and complex theories. Its history can be traced back to at least 30 years, but it has received little attention in the marketing literature. Theory construction according to facet analysis starts with a theoretical definition of the domain of interest, continues with the description of the correspondence between the theoretical definition and on empirical aspects of the observations, and ends with data analysis and hypotheses testing. This paper summarizes the principles of facet analysis and demonstrates its utilization in marketing research and theory constuction.