An Assessment of Consumer Ethnocentrism Tendencies Scale among University Students: The case of Turkish and Bosnian Students

The process of globalization and liberalization of markets brought new challenges and opportunities for both, local and global businesses. A number of studies explored consumer ethnocentric tendencies by making use of CETSCALE, universally accepted measure of the phenomenon developed by Shimp and Sharma in 1987. The present study aims to explore levels of consumer ethnocentrism among university students studying at the International University of Sarajevo using the quantitative research method utilizing the survey originally developed by Shimp and Sharma consisting of 17 questions for inferential statistics, plus four questions added by the author for descriptive statistics to explain differences arising due to demographic characteristics of respondents, including nationality, gender, age and income level. Research was carried out in cross-sectional time-frame study manner utilizing convenience sampling methodology. The questionnaire responses were collected from 150 respondents; freshmen and postgraduate Turkish and Bosnian students in paper form. The CETSCALE value of 79.60 for Bosnian students compared to 74.22 for Turkish indicates that Bosnian students tend to be slightly more ethnocentric consumers than Turkish. Additionally, value of CETSCALE of 84.37 for postgraduates compared to 74.24 for freshmen indicates positive relationship between level of consumer ethnocentrism and level of education. Comparing results with those obtained by other researchers in developed countries, both Bosnian and Turkish students showed higher levels of consumer ethnocentrism. High preference for domestic products expressed by Bosnian students might be a signal for domestic companies to focus more on this population in terms of adjusting their products and marketing activities.