A 4-Factor Revision of the Pathological Buying Screener: the Structure of Compulsive Buying and its Relationship with Five Personal Characteristics

Commonly used scales of compulsive buying do not adequately capture the complexity of compulsive buying as a multidimensional construct, and it is impossible to gain insights into the structure of the dimensions of compulsive buying and their relationship with other individual differences when the items measuring compulsive buying are aggregated into an overall score. The first objective of this paper is to offer a revision of Müller et al.’s (PLoS One, 10(10), e0141094, 2015b) two-factor Pathological Buying Screener (PBS). Based on online surveys with three large samples of English-speaking Canadians (N = 2,000, 1151, and 941), we propose a revised scale (the 4FPBS) consisting of four dimensions: excessive buying (EB), the phenomenological experiences (PH) associated with compulsive buying (which incorporate preoccupation with buying, buying urges, and mood repair), and both the financial problems (FP) and interpersonal problems (IP) resulting from compulsive buying. The second objective is to demonstrate the benefits of retaining four separate dimensions. We propose a structural model of the 4FPBS according to which EB leads to PH, which in turn leads to FP and IP. In addition, both the linear and interactive effects of five personal characteristics (depression, trait self-control, self-esteem, and overt and covert narcissism) on the four compulsive buying dimensions and the relationships between the four dimensions are investigated.