The Importance Of Reading Terms And Conditions: An Analysis Of Consumer Attitudes

The Culture of Providing Terms and Condition

The culture of providing terms and condition has remained a standard for companies for years. The terms and condition are mandatory to provide to the customers, whether it is a service based company selling a service or a product based company trying to sell any particular product to the customer (Owen, Noble and Speed 2017). 

However it has been a choice of the majority not to read the term and condition properly and purchase service and product without knowing the different rules and condition associated with the service or the product. Although it might not seem that significant but it actually has if there is issues regarding the service and products. It creates complicacy when customer wants to have some claim against the particular service or product purchased online and offline (Macaulay 2018). One of the significant issues regarding the noncompliance of terms and conditions is the data scams which consumers often complain only to find that they have very little to claim as everything is properly documented in the given terms and condition. All it needed was proper evaluation and reading of those terms and condition.

Hence the study of people attitude for not reading the terms and conditions is an important one. In order to complement the research proper and effective research methodology is required.

This research methods will be first analysed properly and those methods will be compared. The comparison will be compared based on various aspects. These aspects will include factors like possible benefits and drawbacks of each method. This comparison will then be considered for preparing a critical analysis of the methods and their applicability in this particular research which tries to explore the attitude of consumer towards reading terms and conditions with proper details. The paper will also contain scope of further research with recommendation.

In order to identify the research method first the relevant article has been identified which has explored this topic and conducted research on that. The articles has been identified from various authenticate resources such as IEEE explore, Google scholar and the research gate to make sure that the journals and the articles chosen are authenticate and peer reviewed. The article that has been chosen here is have been searched with keywords such as terms and conditions, consumer behaviour, data scam, importance of term and conditions. These keywords have been used in various resources.

5 article has been chosen in this context based on different methods used in the articles. Hamari, Sjöklint and Ukkonen (2016) have used surveys as the research method. Kraft, Lodge and Taber (2015) have also considered the survey as well.  Two other articles, one by Rho and Tomz (2017) have considered personal interview as the research method while another article by  Obar and Oeldorf-Hirsch (2018)  have considered closed group interview for the research. The other article by Haraoui (2016) have chosen literature review method.

The open ended question considers some predefined question and the users are asked to provide their views to those questions (Fontana and Prokos 2016).

The Significance of Reading Terms and Conditions

It provides the participants record their opinion as per choice

• Opportunity for viewers to think independently
• Better assessment of opinions of the participants
• Possible to gain extra information from the survey including personal informations and opinions on certain aspect which is not possible through close ended questions
• Less error free
• Cost effective

• When large group are considered it is difficult and time consuming to extract the answer with the open ended question
• Often lead to noise compared to close ended question. the noise makes the process difficult to identify the cause that creates the issue

The open ended question includes question and options for the answers that are set before the survey. Users have to choose some predefined question and the users are asked to provide their views to those questions (Cleary, Horsfall and Hayter 2014).

The research method is more concerned in obtaining answer to some questions rather than considering the opinion of the participants.

• Makes it easier to compare and rate the answer of several people collected in the survey
• easy and quick to answer
• easier for the participant to understand the answer of each and every questions
• cost effective

• participant does not think much while choosing options for the answer
• the answers are often chosen reluctantly and in random fashion
• does not give insight about the viewpoint of the participant

It considers one participant at a time and interviews them. The process does not considers any fixed methods or question to interview the question. Questions are asked as per the progress of the interview and the questions are decided as per the nature of the discussion (Popping 2015).

Personal interview conducted in such a way that the participants are comfortable to share and discuss opinions

• more effective in collecting personal views of the participants

• more complex and time consuming
• not cost effective

2 or 3 groups with 3 or 4 participants are formed with one moderator assigned for each group. The views of every group after the group discussion is recorded which is further compared and analysed to prepare the result of the interview on the topic predefined (Brace 2018).

The focused group method is aimed in obtaining group view and opinion on a particular research topic or research question rather than one to one personalised view

• less time consuming
• simpler than the personal interview

• not as effective as the personal interview for obtaining personal opinion on research question
• possibility of bias
• It is also dependent on the group moderator. The success of the process is also dependent on the way the moderator conduct and executes the group discussion. The responsibilities include ensuring everyone in the groups get equal opportunity for expressing views and any single dominance in expressing opinion is not entertained

The method considers the findings of other researchers and those findings are analysed for preparing answer to set research question (Owen, Noble and Speed 2017).

• Less complex and simple to conduct
• Less time consuming
• Cost effective

• Does not give raw data to analyse
• Not an effective way to obtain personal views as the data is not collected with actual participants
• Not possible to identify and rectify the research gap and research limitations of the research work. Hence not effective

The first article by Hamari, Sjöklint and Ukkonen (2016) has used open ended quaternaries as the research method which is often effective than the close ended questionnaires as peoples are more comfortable with the open ended one and give more preference to one that provides the opportunity to express the view more precisely. As per the discussion by the author, it is not possible to understand how people are thinking on certain matters until they are allowed to express their view freely. Close ended questionnaires are more likely to gather opinion on certain parameters that are predefined by certain organization or group of people responsible for conducting the survey. Hence the survey method used by author is more effective than the approach used by Kraft, Lodge and Taber (2015) especially when it is aimed on understanding the viewpoint and attitude of consumers towards reading the terms and conditions. Now this matter being largely personal, the methods used to study this behaviour needs to be personalised as well. Although surveys considering the open ended quaternaries offers personalization, it is not effective as interview though. However one important thing here to note that the not all interview methods are equally effective. The two interview methods discussed here is personal interview and focused group.

Focused group is not as effective as the personal interview when it comes to collect and study personal opinion. For the focus group study Rho and Tomz (2017) have considered the 3 groups each consisting of 4 members and one moderator for each group. Each group was given the topic for discussion. The opinions of each groups recorded. However, according to author one of the major drawback of the focused group is that there is a common tendency between the participant not to open up properly and sometime opinion of some member dominates others and hence the collection of opinion is not always effective and fair in terms of opportunity provided to each participant of the group to express their opinion freely. According to Obar and Oeldorf-Hirsch (2018) if some participants are more confident and have greater command over speaking and expressing views, then it is more likely that the views of those participants will get more preference than others. While in case of personal interview, the opinion of the participants are studied in more details and each participant gets equal opportunity for expressing their views in the way they preferred most. Hence the process is more appropriate for the recoding the personal views with minimum bias in the procedure.

Although literature review has been considered for the research by Haraoui (2016), it is not preferred considering the nature and depth of the subject. As an example if the researchers makes some kind of bias in conducting the research it is not possible to identify those limitations, hence the research as a result will be ineffective. Hence the method is not suitable to understand the reason that makes people not reading the terms and conditions properly.

Hence based on the above analysis and considering the research topic it is seen that the personal interview is most suitable as it is more perfect than the other methods considered in this context.   

Conclusion:

Different researchers have identified the issues and studied the issues while applying various methods for conducting the research. In this paper several research method will be identified which has been used in the selected research papers. The best method is the personal interview because it makes it easier for recording personal opinions of the participants. As the process is one to one basis there is less possibility for biasness as this is in the case of focused group interview.  Questionnaires can also be considered as the research method but it is not as effective as the interview exclusively the personal interview. Although each method has its own sets of benefits and limitations, the least suitable method is the literature review which analyses the research findings of other researches.

Reference:

Brace, I., 2018. Questionnaire design: How to plan, structure and write survey material for effective market research. Kogan Page Publishers.

Cleary, M., Horsfall, J. and Hayter, M., 2014. Data collection and sampling in qualitative research: does size matter?. Journal of advanced nursing, 70(3), pp.473-475.

Fontana, A. and Prokos, A.H., 2016. The interview: From formal to postmodern. Routledge.

Hamari, J., Sjöklint, M. and Ukkonen, A., 2016. The sharing economy: Why people does not consider terms and conditions. Journal of the association for information science and technology, 67(9), pp.2047-2059.

Haraoui, B., 2016. Limitations in the Full Reporting of Systematic Literature Review. The Journal of rheumatology, 43(5), pp.994-994.

Kraft, P.W., Lodge, M. and Taber, C.S., 2015. Why people “don’t trust the evidence” motivated terms and condition. An interactive guide, 658(1), pp.121-133.

Macaulay, S., 2018. Non-contractual relations in business: A preliminary study. In The Law and Society Canon (pp. 155-167). Routledge.

Obar, J.A. and Oeldorf-Hirsch, A., 2018. The biggest lie on the internet: effective review of terms and condition is required. Information, Communication & Society, pp.1-20.

Owen, T., Noble, W. and Speed, F.C., 2017. The Challenges Posed by Scammers to Online Support Groups: The ‘Deserving’and the ‘Undeserving’Victims of Scams. In New Perspectives on Cybercrime (pp. 213-240). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Popping, R., 2015. Analyzing open-ended questions by means of text analysis procedures. Bulletin of Sociological Methodology/Bulletin de Méthodologie Sociologique, 128(1), pp.23-39.

Rho, S. and Tomz, M., 2017. Why Don’t Trade Preferences Reflect Economic Self- the importance of terms and condition Interest?. International Organization, 71(S1), pp.S85-S108.