From Competitive Consumption to Regret of Consumption A Contextualized Exploration of Keeping up With the Joneses in Purchase and Consumption among Women of Mashhad

Introduction: Today, the reasons for more consumption than the basic needs are differentiation, self-glorification, variety, and etc. The culture of keeping up with the Joneses in consumption is developed in Iran. The complexity of Iranian society cannot be expressed in terms of consumption, fashion, or even distinction concept. The complex culture of Iran has very complicated layers that cannot be explained theoretically by conventional theories like the concept of consumption. Therefore, we should try to make this concept visible in the context of Iranian society. For this reason, we should refer to the context of the community and discover the processes that lead to the formation of such a concept (Keep up with the Joneses) and action (competitive interaction). Therefore, this study tended to investigate the formation dynamics of the keep up with the Joneses process in the purchase and consumption of the target sample. Material & Methods: The present study was carried out in the form of qualitative methodology and using the background theory. The sampling was based on theoretical and purposeful sampling. The researcher of this study categorized the areas in which the possibility of keeping up with the Joneses existed in accordance with the results of the preliminary interviews. Also, based on the preliminary interviews of the samples which were selected from different classes of society, the researcher concluded that the samples of the lower classes of the society did not provide much information. Because women of these classes did not have a special wealth to do the keep up with the Joneses behavior in consumption. Therefore, the researcher selected his samples from the women of middle and middle upward classes of Mashhad, who due to having a special wealth, were most attracted to purchasing, consumption and showing off behaviors. In this regard, the information of this study was collected using in-depth and semi-deep interviews. It's worth mentioning that the sampling process has continued to reach the theoretical saturation. In this way, data collection and data analysis were done simultaneously. In this study, open source, axial and selective coding were used in data analysis. Discussion of Results & Conclusions: Research findings consisted of 31 main categories and a core category named regret of consumption. Accordingly, the conceptual tables, paradigm model and theoretical scheme of the research were presented. The interpretation of the res