LIFE-STYLE SEGMENTATION WITH TAILORED INTERVIEWING

The authors present a tailored interviewing procedure for life-style s egmentation. The procedure assumes that a life-style measurement instr ument has been designed. A classification of a sample of consumers int o life-style segments is obtained using a latent-class model. With the se segments, the tailored interview procedure classifies consumers int o the same segments in future studies. The procedure minimizes the err or of misclassification and decreases the interview costs by using onl y a fraction of the items for each respondent. In an empirical applica tion to a questionnaire designed to assess lifestyle related to the co nsumption of fashion, the authors obtain a classification that agrees. with the full interview (i.e., using all scale items) for 73% of the respondents while using only 22% of all the questions in a traditional life-style battery.