Compulsive Buying Tendency (CBT)

Abstract

The Compulsive Buying Tendency (CBT) Scale, developed by Alain d’Astous, J. Maltais, and C. Roberge (1990), is an 11-item self-report psychometric instrument designed to assess chronic, repetitive, and uncontrollable purchasing behaviors driven by negative emotional states, intrusive urges, and impaired impulse control. Originating from clinical and consumer psychology investigations into aberrant purchasing patterns among adolescent and adult consumers, the scale captures the continuum between normative consumer spending and clinical compulsive buying—historically designated as oniomania or Compulsive Buying Disorder (CBD). The instrument evaluates key behavioral and affective dimensions of compulsive acquisition, including irresistible pre-shopping tensions, mood-compensatory purchasing, post-transactional guilt, and secrecy surrounding acquired goods. Administered using an authentic 5-point Likert-type response format ranging from 1 (Strongly disagree / Never) to 5 (Strongly agree / Always), the instrument yields an aggregated dimensional score reflecting individual vulnerability to shopping-related dysregulation. Across multiple validation studies, the CBT scale has demonstrated robust psychometric reliability, with internal consistency coefficients typically spanning from $alpha\; =\; .80$ to $alpha\; =\; .89$, along with strong convergent validity with measures of depression, materialism, low self-esteem, generalized impulsivity, and credit card abuse. This article presents a thorough psychometric and theoretical review of the scale, examining its theoretical lineage, construct operationalization, structural factor integrity, empirical validity indices, clinical and research applications, and complete administrative parameters.

Keywords

Compulsive Buying Tendency, Oniomania, Behavioral Addiction, Consumer Behavior, Impulse Control Disorders, Psychometrics, Alain d’Astous, Affective Dysregulation, Post-Purchase Guilt, Compensatory Consumption

Authors

The Compulsive Buying Tendency Scale was formulated and psychometrically investigated by:

• Alain d’Astous, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing at HEC Montréal (Honorary/Emeritus), Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Dr. d’Astous is an internationally recognized scholar in consumer psychology, research methodology, and maladaptive consumer decision-making.
• J. Maltais, M.Sc. — Department of Marketing, Faculty of Administration, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada.
• C. Roberge, M.Sc. — Department of Marketing, Faculty of Administration, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada.

Correspondence regarding original research on the adolescent consumer cohorts can be traced to the Department of Marketing, HEC Montréal, 3000 chemin de la Côte-Sainte-Catherine, Montréal (Québec), Canada H3T 2A7.

Purpose

The Compulsive Buying Tendency Scale was engineered to resolve critical theoretical and methodological gaps in the quantification of non-normative consumer acquisition. While classical consumer behavior frameworks long operated under the assumption of the rational, utility-maximizing economic agent, clinical practitioners and marketing scholars recognized that a vulnerable subset of consumers engages in chronic, repetitive purchasing characterized by diminished inhibitory control, psychological distress, and severe economic consequences.

Specifically, the purpose of the instrument encompasses several key clinical and empirical objectives:

• Differentiating Normative from Pathological Consumption: The scale distinguishes benign, recreational, or occasional impulsive buying from chronic, compulsive buying. While impulsive buying is primarily stimulus-driven, hedonic, and unplanned, compulsive buying is internally driven, anhedonic, ritualistic, and utilized as a maladaptive coping mechanism to escape negative affective states.
• Assessment in Vulnerable Demographics: Introduced within a pivotal study examining adolescent consumers (d’Astous et al., 1990), the instrument was designed to capture early-onset compulsive shopping tendencies during developmental stages when socialization, peer pressure, identity formation, and credit accessibility intersect.
• Facilitating Cross-Disciplinary Research: The CBT provides an empirically parsimonious, non-stigmatizing measure suitable for psychiatric epidemiology, behavioral economics, consumer policy regulation, and financial counseling.
• Evaluating Clinical Interventions: In psychotherapeutic settings (such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for impulse control disorders and behavioral addictions), the scale functions as an objective pre- and post-treatment assessment to measure reductions in subjective urges, post-purchase remorse, and shopping-related deception.

Psychological Construct

The CBT scale operationalizes compulsive buying as a dimensional, multifaceted psychological construct positioned at the intersection of behavioral addictions, affective disorders, and obsessive-compulsive spectrum conditions. Rather than conceptualizing compulsive buying as an isolated financial lapse, the construct reflects an intricate behavioral sequence characterized by several interconnected psychological dimensions:

1. Irresistible Impulses and Behavioral Urges

At the core of the compulsive buying construct is the experience of powerful, ego-dystonic cravings to purchase, regardless of financial capability or functional need. Items such as “There are times when I have a strong urge to buy things” and “As soon as I enter a shopping center, I feel an irresistible urge to buy something” measure subjective cravings and classical conditioning triggered by commercial environments. The urge is characterized by an escalating sense of internal tension that can typically only be attenuated by performing the physical or digital act of acquisition.

2. Compensatory Emotional Regulation (Negative Reinforcement)

Compulsive buying functions primarily as a dysfunctional affect-regulation strategy. Unlike normative recreational shoppers seeking novelty, compulsive buyers utilize shopping to blunt acute psychological distress, loneliness, anxiety, or depressive affect. Items such as “For me, shopping is a way of getting through a bad day” and “I feel better after buying something” capture the short-term negative reinforcement cycle. The purchase momentarily alleviates dysphoria, producing transient emotional relief or euphoric mood elevation, which reinforces the spending response.

3. Impaired Self-Regulation and Automaticity

The construct captures significant deficits in executive control and self-directed behavioral inhibition. Reflected in items such as “When I have money, I cannot help but spend it” and “I often buy things that I do not need,” the compulsive buyer displays marked impulsivity, an inability to delay gratification, and a persistent failure to align immediate purchasing behavior with long-term financial survival goals.

4. Post-Purchase Guilt, Distress, and Remorse

A primary criterion differentiating compulsive buying from simple hedonistic consumption is the rapid onset of post-transactional cognitive dissonance, affective collapse, and guilt. The items “I am often bothered by the fact that I bought something unnecessary” and “I feel a sense of guilt after making purchases” evaluate the acute psychological distress that emerges immediately after the transient euphoric release dissipates. The individual recognizes the irrationality and financial damage of the behavior, precipitating a secondary cycle of negative affect that frequently prompts subsequent compensatory shopping episodes.

5. Concealment and Social Deception

As compulsive buying progresses, the interpersonal fallout necessitates covert strategies. Item 5, “I often hide things I bought from my family or friends,” taps into the interpersonal deceit, social alienation, and shame associated with the behavior. Concealment reflects the individual’s awareness of social disapproval, financial devastation, and behavioral loss of control, serving as a reliable behavioral marker of pathological severity.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the Compulsive Buying Tendency Scale draws extensively upon earlier conceptualizations formulated by Valence, d’Astous, and Fortier (1988), integrated with contemporary models of self-regulation failure (Baumeister et al., 1994), operant conditioning paradigms, and escape theory (Heatherton & Baumeister, 1991).

The Valence, d’Astous, and Fortier (1988) Paradigm

Valence et al. (1988) conceptualized compulsive buying as an ongoing behavioral continuum ranging from normal purchasing to severe psychological pathology. Their model post-conditions that compulsive buying is determined by three interacting psychological forces:

1. Emotional Predisposition: Underlying generalized anxiety, depression, pervasive low self-worth, and externalized locus of control.
2. Cognitive Mediators: Extreme consumer materialism, belief in commercial acquisition as a source of social status, and low self-efficacy regarding spending discipline.
3. Physiological and Emotional Arousal: Somatic activation experienced within shopping contexts, creating strong conditioned neurobiological feedback loops.

Escape Theory and Compensatory Consumer Behavior

Drawing on Roy Baumeister’s escape theory, compulsive buying can be understood as an active deconstructive mental process. When individuals experience acute discrepancies between their ideal self and their perceived real self, the resulting psychological pain is intolerable. Compulsive shopping allows the consumer to narrow cognitive focus strictly to immediate environmental stimuli—colors, product displays, sales interactions—thereby systematically escaping high-level self-awareness and depressive rumination. The 11 items of the CBT directly map onto this escape cycle, tracking the transition from pre-purchase emotional distress to hedonic distraction, followed by acute awareness collapse and subsequent guilt-driven distress.

Validity

Extensive psychometric investigations have affirmed the construct, criterion, convergent, and discriminant validity of the CBT scale across diverse geographic, developmental, and cultural populations.

Construct and Convergent Validity

In the foundational validation study by d’Astous, Maltais, and Roberge (1990) involving a large sample of adolescent consumers ($N\; =\; 837$), CBT scores demonstrated statistically significant positive correlations with:

• Generalized Urges to Spend: Strong convergent alignment with clinical impulse control inventories ($r\; =\; .50$ to $.65$, ).
• Consumer Materialism: Moderate to high correlations ($r\; =\; .42$, ) with Richins and Dawson’s Material Values Scale, corroborating the theoretical premise that compulsive buyers ascribe excessive psychological value to material acquisitions.
• Credit Card Abuse: Direct, significant correlations with frequency of credit card usage, maintaining unpaid balances, and revolving debt installments ($r\; =\; .35$ to $.48$, ).
• Affective Distress: Consistent moderate associations with depressive symptomatology (CES-D) and chronic anxiety inventories ($r\; =\; .38$ to $.52$).

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity has been rigorously demonstrated by separating compulsive buying from impulsive buying. While impulsive buying correlates predominantly with trait extraversion, spontaneous sensation seeking, and positive emotional states, the CBT scale uniquely correlates with high neuroticism, negative emotionality, chronic low self-esteem, post-purchase distress, and severe functional impairment. Furthermore, comparative analyses indicate that the CBT scale diverges cleanly from general obsessive-compulsive inventory (OCI-R) scores; while both involve repetitive behavior, compulsive buying is characterized by an initial phase of ego-syntonic hedonic reward, which is absent in classical OCD rituals.

Criterion and Predictive Validity

The scale effectively predicts real-world deleterious outcomes. Longitudinal and cross-sectional consumer studies indicate that higher scores on the CBT scale reliably predict individual insolvency, legal consequences secondary to debt, severe interpersonal conflict within families or partnerships, and covert credit acquisition.

Reliability

The 11-item CBT scale exhibits strong and stable reliability parameters across diverse demographic samples, including high school adolescents, university undergraduates, and general consumer panels.

Internal Consistency

In the initial psychometric validation across adolescent populations conducted by d’Astous et al. (1990), the scale yielded an overall Cronbach’s alpha of $alpha\; =\; .80$. Subsequent replications, cross-cultural adaptations, and clinical comparative studies (e.g., d’Astous, 1990; Lejoyeux et al., 2007; Müller et al., 2015) have reported internal consistency coefficients ranging consistently between $alpha\; =\; .81$ and $alpha\; =\; .89$. Item-total correlations across the 11 items range from $r\; =\; .42$ to $r\; =\; .68$, confirming that each item contributes meaningfully to the shared variance of the overarching construct without excessive collinearity or redundancy.

Test-Retest Stability

Temporal stability assessments over intervals ranging from 4 to 8 weeks have demonstrated test-retest reliability coefficients spanning $r\_\{tt\}\; =\; .76$ to $.84$, indicating that the instrument captures a relatively enduring behavioral and psychological disposition rather than transient, context-dependent spending sprees.

Factor Analysis

Both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) have been deployed in literature to scrutinize the latent structural dimensionality of the 11 items.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Principal components and common factor analyses originally conducted by d’Astous and colleagues revealed a dominant primary factor accounting for the majority of the explained variance (typically between 38% and 48% of total variance across independent cohorts), with eigenvalues exceeding 4.0. While some exploratory rotations suggest secondary factor splittings—separating emotional relief/hedonic regulation (e.g., Items 6, 11) from post-purchase remorse/secrecy (e.g., Items 2, 5, 7) and irresistible urge/automaticity (e.g., Items 1, 3, 9, 10)—the heavy loading of all items onto a single first unrotated factor strongly supports treating the CBT as an essentially unidimensional scale.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Structural equation modeling and CFA testing a unidimensional model have indicated acceptable to good global model fit parameters across multiple consumer samples:

• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Values typically range from $.048$ to $.068$ (90% CI [.039, .078]), indicating adequate approximation.
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Values consistently exceed $.92$, with optimized samples yielding $text\{CFI\}\; >\; .95$.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Estimates consistently maintain parity with the CFI, ranging between $.91$ and $.94$.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Observed below $.052$, reflecting negligible residual discrepancies.

All standardized factor loadings ($lambda$) for the 11 items are statistically significant (), generally falling between $.48$ and $.79$, with the highest loadings routinely observed on Item 3 (“There are times when I have a strong urge to buy things”) and Item 9 (“I have often experienced an unbearable urge to go shopping”).

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Type: Self-administered psychological assessment / self-report survey scale.
• Target Population: Adolescents (ages 14–19) and adult consumers; widely validated across clinical and community populations.
• Number of Items: 11 items.
• Administration Time: Approximately 3 to 5 minutes.
• Authentic Response Scale: 5-point Likert-type scale:
  • 1 = Strongly disagree / Never
  • 2 = Disagree / Rarely
  • 3 = Neutral / Sometimes
  • 4 = Agree / Often
  • 5 = Strongly agree / Always
• Reverse-Scored Items: None. All 11 items are positively worded and scored directly in the direction of compulsive buying tendencies.
• Scoring and Interpretation Procedures:
  • Total Summed Score: Item ratings (from 1 to 5) are summed to produce a composite raw score ranging from 11 to 55.
  • Mean Index Score: Alternatively, scores can be averaged across the 11 items to produce a mean score ranging from 1.0 to 5.0.
  • Interpretation Benchmarks: While the CBT is primarily a continuous dimension of vulnerability rather than a binary diagnostic cutoff, empirical literature typically identifies scores exceeding 1 to 1.5 standard deviations above the population mean (frequently sum scores $ge\; 38$–$42$ or mean scores $ge\; 3.5$–$3.8$) as indicative of severe compulsive buying tendencies requiring clinical evaluation.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Compulsive Buying Tendency Scale was published in 1990 in the academic proceedings Advances in Consumer Research by the Association for Consumer Research (ACR). As an academic contribution published in open conference proceedings, the instrument is generally accessible without licensing fees for non-commercial academic research, empirical theses, and educational purposes, provided that proper bibliographic attribution is accorded to the original authors (d’Astous, Maltais, & Roberge, 1990). Clinical institutions, commercial consumer analytics entities, and proprietary diagnostic software providers seeking commercial adaptation should secure formal written permission from the lead author or the copyright holders.

References

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• Baumeister, R. F., Heatherton, T. F., & Tice, D. M. (1994). Losing control: How and why people fail at self-regulation. Academic Press.
• Black, D. W. (2007). A review of compulsive buying disorder. World Psychiatry, 6(1), 14–18. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1805733/
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• Valence, G., d’Astous, A., & Fortier, L. (1988). Compulsive buying: Concept and measurement. Journal of Consumer Policy, 11(4), 419–433. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00411854

Items of the Scale