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Study Abroad Case Study Essay

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Dissertation Title An investigation into the customer journey of a student’s decision to study abroad: A case study on Scottish Erasmus students. Introduction Consumers make several buying decisions each and every day (Armstrong and Kotler, 2012). There is a strong academic interest in why consumers make such decisions and their buying behaviour (Armstrong and Kotler, 2012; Solomon et al, 2013; Shiffman et al, 2012). Shiffman et al (2012) defines consumer behaviour as ‘the behaviour that consumers display in the searching for, purchasing, using, evaluating and disposing of products and services.’ It is argued that consumers are strongly influenced by several factors when making a purchase; such as cultural, social, personal and psychological characteristics these factors affect consumer behaviour as a whole (Armstrong and Kotler, 2012). There is a lack of research on why students decide to make the decision to participate in exchange programmes. Studying abroad is defined by McKeown (2009) as an education experience where students leave their home country to engage in study, cultural interaction, and other related activities in a foreign country which will host the experience. This is seen to be an important part of higher education as students are expected to develop intercultural understanding and cross-cultural communication (Doyle et al., 2009). Erasmus was established in 1987 and by the year 2013 the programme had in excess of three million participants since the

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