The 5S's of Consumer Health: A Framework and Curation of JCR Articles on Health and Medical Decision-Making

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INTRODUCTION

Every day, consumers make decisions that have both direct and indirect impact on their health. The COVID-19 pandemic, and the long-term physical and mental complications that have ensued, underscores the importance of developing a holistic understanding of drivers of consumers’ health and medical decisions. Without this comprehensive approach, health appeals or interventions are destined to fall short of achieving positive and long-lasting outcomes. Beyond the pandemic, medical and biotechnological advancements can have greater impact on global lifespan when the behavioral sciences offer a critical, complementary lens to enhance the understanding, adoption, and implementation of these new technologies. By illuminating how consumers think, feel, choose, and behave in this multi-faceted decision environment, consumer researchers are well equipped to contribute to the ongoing quest to improve population health.

In this curation, we review many articles published in the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) that focus on a spectrum of health and medical decisions, while highlighting five (Bolton et al. 2008; Botti, Orfali, and Iyengar 2009; Briley, Rudd, and Aaker 2017; Longoni, Bonezzi, and Morewedge 2019; Moorman and Matulich 1993). We define consumer health and medical decisions broadly, as those relating to the prevention (e.g., minimizing stress, moderating alcohol consumption), diagnosis (e.g., utilizing health professionals for checkups), remedy and improvement (e.g., taking medication to cure an infection), and maintenance (e.g., monitoring dietary intake) of consumer health (Moorman and Matulich 1993). We build on these articles to propose a new 5S (Self, Social, Solution, Service provider, Societal/Situational) framework to explain holistic drivers underlying consumers’ health and medical decisions (figure 1). We hope that researchers will find this conceptual framework useful in structuring the existing consumer research literature on health. Furthermore, the 5S framework provides a clear set of four key directions that future researchers will find worthwhile in undertaking research on health and medical decision-making—either by delving deeper into the 5Ss or by going bigger and broader beyond the scope of past research.