Title: Understanding the lifestyle of health and sustainability - an exploratory study

Authors: Oliver Posegga; Matthäus Paul Zylka; Johannes Putzke; Kai Fischbach; Detlef Schoder

Addresses: Department of Information Systems and Social Networks, University of Bamberg, An der Weberei 5, 96047 Bamberg, Germany ' Department of Information Systems and Social Networks, University of Bamberg, An der Weberei 5, 96047 Bamberg, Germany ' Department of Information Systems and Information Management, University of Cologne, Pohligstr. 1, 50969 Köln, Germany ' Department of Information Systems and Social Networks, University of Bamberg, An der Weberei 5, 96047 Bamberg, Germany ' Department of Information Systems and Information Management, University of Cologne, Pohligstr. 1, 50969 Köln, Germany

Abstract: The goal of this paper is to study the psychographic and demographic attributes and the interests of lifestyle of health and sustainability (LOHAS) consumers. Based on a dataset of 3,813 user profiles from the largest LOHAS community site on Facebook, we applied association rule mining and logistic regression to achieve this goal. We focused our work on applying the collaborative innovation network (COIN) concept to the LOHAS consumer. Results show that LOHAS consumers have a strong spiritual attitude and a general interest in outdoor and fitness activities such as hiking, gardening, and yoga. Finally, we provide a description of a LOHAS consumer profile archetype and compare our findings to existing work.

Keywords: healthy lifestyle; sustainable lifestyle; health; sustainability; LOHAS; social network analysis; SNA; online social networking; ONS; consumer segmentation; ethnographic study; green consumers; Facebook; collaborative innovation networks; COINs; swarm creativity; psychographics; demographics; association rules mining; logistic regression; spiritual attitudes; outdoor activities; fitness activities.

DOI: 10.1504/IJODE.2014.065071

International Journal of Organisational Design and Engineering, 2014 Vol.3 No.3/4, pp.338 - 357

Published online: 25 Oct 2014 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article