Quality matters: reviewing the connections between perceived quality and clothing use time | Emerald Insight - Chuyên Trang Chia Sẻ Kiến Thức Thời Trang Mới Nhất

The study draws together studies on perceived quality, presenting the foundational literature and key concepts of quality of clothing. It summarizes them in a conceptual map that may help visualize various aspects affecting the assessment of quality and deepen the general understanding of the quality of garments.

The main ideas from the articles are thematized into the following sections: the process of assessment, levels involved in assessment, multidimensional cues of assessment, and quality and clothing use times. The paper highlights that perceiving quality is a process guided by both expectations and experience, and assembles the various aspects into a conceptual map that depicts the connections between the conceptual levels involved in assessing quality. It also illustrates connections between quality and clothing use times.

Extending the active lifetimes of garments by producing better quality is a widely discussed strategy for reducing environmental impacts of the garment industry. While quality is an important aspect of clothing, the concept of quality is ambiguous, and, moreover, consumers may perceive quality in individual ways. Therefore, it is important to deepen the general understanding regarding the quality of clothing.

Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

Mục lục

Theoretical background: quality as a concept

In general terms, “quality” is both a philosophical question and an everyday concept, which defines features of products as well as performance of human individuals, organizations and societies. Although quality is an underlying character that belongs to many contexts, its definition is ambiguous (Anttila and Jussila, 2017). A dictionary definition describes quality, for example, as (1) “the standard of something as measured against other things of a similar kind,” (2) “the degree of excellence of something” and (3) “a distinctive attribute or characteristic possessed by someone or something” (Lexico, 2020).

The concept of quality is relative and therefore may have different meanings depending on the context and the set criteria that it is compared to (Lillrank, 1998). There are multiple definitions and/or models that aim to capture the complexity the concept of quality. Different definitions of quality are appropriate in different circumstances, and each has its strengths and weaknesses in relation to measurement, usefulness and relevance of the concept. Most likely an all-encompassing definition of quality does not exist (Reeves and Bednar, 1994). One way to analyze the quality of a product (or service) is to recognize its different dimensions such as performance, features, reliability, conformance, durability, serviceability, aesthetics and perceived quality, and rank them individually (Garvin, 1988).

Garvin (1988) points out that quality can be considered and evaluated differently depending on the chosen viewpoint, such as product, manufacturing, user or value. For example, the user-based definition of quality is a subjective view that describes quality as properties that best satisfy consumers’ individual preferences. Adding to these perspectives, Lillrank (1998) discusses also a system-based view on quality. This view takes into account both the intentional and unintentional consequences a product might have on the society and the environment; hence, a good-quality product should not have a negative impact on the environment (Lillrank, 1998).

To simplify, quality is often differentiated into objective and perceived quality, noting that these may be different from each other. “Objective quality” generally refers to measurable and verifiable evaluation of certain product attributes by predetermined quality standards. “Perceived quality” can be seen as a consumer’s subjective judgment about the quality of a product, and it depends on the individual context; this assessment may be similar to an attitude (Zeithaml, 1988).

The individual process of evaluating quality involves quality cues and quality attributes. “Quality cues” refer to the informational stimuli related to the quality of the product, and can be ascertained through senses. They are utilized prior to consumption, and thus serve as a means to achieve certain ends that are valued by the consumer, such as certain quality attributes or benefits (Steenkamp, 1990). Various cues can be categorized as intrinsic and extrinsic cues. “Intrinsic cues” involve product attributes that cannot be changed without altering the physical characteristics of the product itself, such as material features and performance characteristics. “Extrinsic cues” refer to product-related but external aspects, such as brand, price, reputation, country of origin and marketing (Bubonia, 2014; Olson and Jacoby, 1972; Zeithaml, 1988; Niinimäki, 2015).

“Quality attributes” refer to the functional and psychosocial features of the product. Some quality attributes can be viewed as experience attributes referring to the qualities ascertained by the actual experience with the product. Some other attributes are considered as credence attributes since they cannot be noticed immediately through use, but reveal themselves later, or require additional information given by experts; for example, durability and reliability can be regarded as “credence attributes” (Steenkamp, 1990). According to a conceptual model of the quality perception process by Steenkamp (1990), consumers form perceptions about product quality with the help of extrinsic and intrinsic cues, combined with the acquired information about experience and credence attributes. This process is individual and affected by personal and situational factors.

Since objective and perceived quality are both aspects of quality, Golder et al. (2012) suggest a quality framework that aims to integrate these aspects. It is comprised of three processes: quality production, quality experience and quality evaluation. In this framework, “quality production” is related to the design and production of products, with a focus on performance and reliability. “Quality experience” refers to the process in which customers perceive and experience the attributes of products. “Quality evaluation” represents the conversion of perceived quality attributes into the total assessment of quality. This study also highlights that what customers experience and perceive is filtered through their measurement knowledge, motivation, emotions and expectations; customers do not perceive all attributes they experience and might overlook some attributes entirely.

Along the same lines, Stylidis et al. (2020) expand the definition of perceived quality by integrating product attributes with the personal experience of them. They define perceived quality domain as the “place where the product meaning, form, sensorial properties, and their execution intersect with human experience. Such an experience is driven by the interplay between product quality and its context” (p. 40). Thus, they propose a framework for perceived quality that is based on the primary human senses – visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory and gustatory – involved in the evaluation process. Stylidis et al. (2020) stress that in order to benefit from the theoretical understanding of quality, the industry requires a toolbox of assessment methods.

The same terminologies and definitions related to quality in general are also applied in the context of clothing. Material features can be considered as the objective quality of clothing and evaluated with a variety of methods, such as tests for breaking strength, tear strength, abrasion resistance, colorfastness, effects of laundering (e.g. color and dimensional change), seam strength and pilling (Bubonia, 2014; Cooper et al., 2014). Nevertheless, as summarized above, there are many more features related to quality that cannot be objectively measured, and yet they play a significant role in the assessment of quality. Therefore, it is meaningful to take a closer look at how the perceived quality of clothing is being researched, understood and discussed.

Materials and method

The current stream of research considers quality as one of the elements related to the questions of sustainability: low quality is associated with the early disposal of clothing, while the producing of better quality is expected to extend the clothing use times (e.g. Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017). Against this backdrop, the aim of this paper is to gain more understanding on the concept of quality in the context of clothing that could be further applied, particularly in the work regarding sustainability.

Building on the concept of quality in the context of clothing and its relationship to clothing lifespan, this paper reviews and synthesizes selected literature of quality in an integrative way (Torraco, 2005) with an aim to provide a wide overview of the concept of perceived quality. Since the integrative literature review can be used, for example, to define concepts and review theories, as well as to create new understanding and/or reconceptualize both mature and emerging topics (Torraco, 2005; Whittemore and Knafl, 2005), it seemed suitable for reviewing the various studies of clothing quality and surveying its links to garment use times. Thus, instead of reviewing and summarizing the existing literature related to the quality of clothing comprehensively, the aim of this integrated review is to present a summary of literature representative of and pertinent to the following research questions:

How is the quality of clothing perceived and what aspects does it involve?
What kinds of connections between quality and garment use times exist?

The literature was selected according to the relevance regarding the research interests of this paper and obtained primarily through a survey focusing on fashion/clothing/apparel journals mainly in the context of design, education, marketing and management. There are numerous technically oriented papers in the field of objective quality assessment that examine various physical properties related to textiles and garments. Instead of reviewing those studies assessing objective quality in the context of textile science and technology (requiring, for example, the expertise of textile engineering), the focus of this paper is on perceived quality.

Studies reviewed in this paper were searched through the database of Scopus using the following keywords: “clothing,” “garment,” “fashion,” “apparel,” “quality,” “lifetimes” and “lifespan.” The search yielded a total of 573 titles of articles that were screened, searching for topics related to the objectives of this paper. In case of suitable terms in the title, the relevance of the paper was determined by scanning through the keywords and abstract, and further, through the entire article. Two search modes are recommended to ensure all the relevant studies are discovered that may not appear in the database search due to the potentially inconsistent keywords or indexing (Whittemore and Knafl, 2005). Therefore, six established and relevant journals from the field of fashion/clothing/apparel journals were reviewed in more detail by browsing manually through all the titles of the selected journals over the period of past ten years (2009–2020); for the manual search, the timeframe of ten years was considered to cover the most recent research. The second phase of the search was conducted with the same approach regarding keywords and screening procedure. Additional literature considered useful for this study was found by reviewing citations from articles obtained through the search.

There are countless studies on clothing and quality conducted using various methods. This paper does not aim to cover them all. The studies included in this review were evaluated by considering how the paper helps expanding the understanding of quality, providing insight particularly to (1) perceived quality in the context of clothing and/or (2) the links between quality and clothing lifespan. Also, in most of the chosen articles, the main body of the text referred to quality; therefore, studies that merely mentioned quality but did not specifically contribute to developing that understanding were excluded. Based on the survey described above, 40 selected research articles and seven other works, such as conference papers and reports (total of 47), were included in this review (Appendix); this number does not include the literature used specifically in the Theoretical background section, which discusses quality as a general concept.

The idea was not to analyze and categorize the various research set-ups but to gather overarching themes of these studies to serve as an informative summary to different approaches to quality in the context of clothing. The literature resulting from the survey was organized conceptually in order to introduce the main themes of the reviewed studies. Applying a thematic analysis method, the content of each study was reduced by identifying, extracting and coding its main ideas into a manageable framework (cf. Whittemore and Knafl, 2005). The data were then examined by comparing item by item to identify patterns, themes and/or relationships so that similar data were categorized and grouped together into themes, and further into subthemes (Braun and Clarke, 2006). Each theme was named according to its core content presented in the Summary of the review section. Lastly, as one of the aims of an integrative literature review is to highlight the core issues and weave streams of research together (Torraco, 2005), this paper aims to give a comprehensive portrayal of the topic (Whittemore and Knafl, 2005) by synthetizing the main ideas into a conceptual map (Figure 1) and discussing the core issues in relation to the research question.

Discussion

This paper explores how quality is conceptualized in the context of clothing and examines potential connections between quality and garment use time. It also aims to provide a synthesis of concepts from the selected literature that may enable better understanding of the perceived quality of clothing. Applying concepts and perspectives of the reviewed studies and also of general literature of quality, this paper maps out the relevant aspects of perceived quality in the context of clothing in the following way (Figure 1):

This map integrates the main elements of perceived quality as extracted from the literature and discussed in the earlier sections of this paper. It depicts the three main themes emerging from the literature – the process of assessment, levels involved in the assessment and multidimensional cues of assessment – and their different elements. Each concept may include more notions than the ones mentioned here, and the concepts may overlap somewhat.

Firstly, the figure shows the process of assessment, referring to the two main phases of quality assessment: (1) before purchase and (2) product in use (e.g. Abraham-Murali and Littrell, 1995). Secondly, conceptual processes, representing the theme of levels involved in assessment, influence the process of evaluation; they are named here as (1) expectations and (2) experience. The label “Expectations” refers also to the time “Before purchase” (or any other way to obtain a garment; could be also renting, borrowing or receiving a garment), and therefore indicates the first phase of evaluation. It can be illustrated through the question, “What the item is?” “Experience” refers to the second phase of evaluation, “Product in use,” and therefore, to the insight gained by personal experience. Through experience, one may gain more understanding about the question, “What the item can do for me?” (cf. De Klerk and Lubbe, 2008). These questions concern each phase respectively but also simultaneously. Here, different personal factors influence and shape the perceiving of quality. These include the knowledge of clothing and textiles (e.g. Apeagyei et al., 2013), and demographic factors such as culture and gender (e.g. Jin et al., 2010).

The third theme, multidimensional cues of assessment, is presented in the figure as several smaller categories, that is, informational cues used in the evaluation. The concepts of price, place, brand and marketing play a role particularly at the time before purchase, and thus may influence the expectations. The concepts of design, care and aesthetic experience concern more the functionality of the product, and therefore the use-phase; these quality assessment cues are gained through the experience of using the product. Three concepts in particular, product, aesthetics and sustainability, are placed between the two phases of evaluation, depicting that these are considered significantly during both phases, fundamentally affecting the entire assessment of quality.

All concepts of the figure have been discussed in detail in the earlier sections of the paper, and the related keywords are placed within each particular concept. For example, “Product” refers to the material features of the garment, such as construction, materials color and finishing; these indicate elements of objective quality and communicate, for example, the durability of garment. “Aesthetics” include the ideas of beauty, style and trend, and this evaluation is essentially influenced by the context where the garment is going to be used. The “aesthetic experience” is identified as a distinct concept, referring to what feelings, emotions and thoughts the garment evokes, thus involving the sensory, emotional and cognitive dimensions of the individual (De Klerk and Lubbe, 2008).

Lastly, to clarify, “Sustainability” refers here to the ethical and environmental quality, and how it has been realized and communicated to consumers. According to the system-based view of quality in general, ethical and environmental matters are essential aspects of the overall quality of any product; it implicates that a good-quality product should not have a negative impact on the environment (Lillrank, 1998). In today’s context, considering the existing knowledge on the impacts of clothing and textile manufacturing (e.g. Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017), the system-based view of quality (Lillrank, 1998) can be argued as a requirement of good quality. In this conceptual map, sustainability is assumed to be significant during both phases of quality assessment, and therefore to shape the entire perception of quality. It can be considered as a credence attribute that cannot be noticed directly through use, but can be acknowledged through the additional information given by experts (cf. Steenkamp, 1990).

This figure illustrates that quality assessment is an individual conceptual process that is influenced by different cues and factors. While the two phases of assessment can be clearly separated, the perception of quality is a process that evolves (Abraham-Murali and Littrell, 1995; Connor-Crabb and Rigby, 2019). Thus, the different aspects influencing the individual expectations and experience most likely play some role in both phases. Some aspects considered before the purchase may be meaningful in the use-phase; for example, “Brand” may be connected to self-esteem and social recognition, and therefore affects the experience of wearing the garment (cf. Hines and O’Neal, 1995). The figure is a conceptual map that aims to simplify and illustrate the complex assessment process and its elements.

Regarding the second research question, this paper investigates links between quality and clothing use times. Figure 2 depicts how objective and perceived quality both play a role in clothing use time. Physical features of clothing affect the perceiving of quality, and therefore using both types of cues, consumers assess the quality of clothing and determine how long the clothing is in use. As visualized in this figure, clothing lifespan covers more than individual ownership and use time (Klepp et al., 2020); it refers to the ownership of clothing, but also to all other ways of use, such as renting and borrowing. It also covers other ways of extending the use time after the first ownership, such as second-hand market and donations, and also the potentials of modifications and upcycling.

The limitations of the study

The summary of articles presented in this paper is based on an integrated literature review, which does not aim at an all-inclusive review of existing studies. Instead, it aims to generate new perspectives to a mature topic by using selected literature (Torraco, 2005). Therefore, the results of the study do not provide statistical data or the exhaustive summaries of existing studies, but a qualitative synthesis of the chosen subject. The literature has been gathered around the topic and the research questions with an intention to bring attention to the potential links between quality and use time of clothing in the context of sustainability. The conceptualizations emerge from the review; however, there are obviously countless ways to identify and thematize the core ideas of the reviewed studies. A systematic survey was supplemented by manual literature search to discover all the potential studies to be included in the review; however, due to search criteria, it is possible that not all the relevant existing studies were found. As for validity of this study, the paper has aimed to be grounded on the data and to include and summarize all the core areas of the reviewed studies.

The review also shows that some research results are contradictory. For example, there is no consensus about the most important aspect of quality. As Lennon and Fairhurst (1994) mention, findings from different studies related to the assessment of perceived quality of clothing are sometimes inconsistent, perhaps due to the different methods of operationalizing and measuring quality. Therefore, this paper gathers the many aspects related to perceived quality of clothing.

Conclusion

This paper outlines perspectives to quality on a general level and reviews the current literature of perceived quality of clothing. Integrating the key concepts of quality from the reviewed literature, the relevant aspects are assembled into a conceptual map (Figure 1) that represents particularly a users’ point of view to evaluating quality. It aims to illustrate that for a consumer, assessing quality is a process that is shaped first by the expectations of the garment, and further by the experience of using it. The conceptual map presents aspects gathered from the literature, yet it does not place them in any order regarding their priority, as the significance and weight of different quality attributes may be individual and related to the context (Connor-Crabb and Rigby, 2019; Zeithaml, 1988). However, there is an assumption that certain concepts concern more either the first or the second phase of the assessment.

While this paper focuses on perceived quality, the importance of objective quality is not overlooked; in order to have a general view of quality, both perspectives are necessary. Figure 2 aims to illustrate how both objective quality and perceived quality matter in determining the use time of clothing. Objective quality communicates measurable information, for example, about the durability of materials, which cannot be merely perceived and estimated by senses. The viewpoint of perceived quality is obviously subjective, and therefore imperfect to actually measure aspects of quality. Yet, even the objective quality is perceived and experienced in individual ways in everyday life, and this influences how long the garment is in use (Connor-Crabb and Rigby, 2019). Therefore, understanding the concept of quality from the user’s perspective is essential for gaining knowledge of garment lifetime in relation to sustainability strategies.

This paper illustrates how multifaceted the concept of quality is and how the individual context – including expectations and experiences – influences the interpretations of quality. As pointed out by Huang and Tan (2007), there may be a gap between what consumers desire and what designers think they desire in terms quality. In order to improve clothing quality, besides developing physical features, there is a need to understand what kinds of cues indicate quality to consumers. Moreover, it is necessary to understand how this information could be applied in the design and production phases as well as in the communicating of technical quality features to consumers. A toolbox that can be used in context-specific situations in the industry could be useful (cf. Stylidis et al., 2020). Many of the reviewed studies highlighted the importance of aesthetics as a significant criterion of quality to consumers, which indicates that aesthetic aspects should not be omitted when developing technical quality features.

As for managerial implications, the paper serves as an integrated review of the elements of quality to be considered in the design and production process, but also aims to inspire to develop the ways of communicating quality to consumers. In addition, the paper brings closer the topics of quality and clothing use time, calling attention to the need for further studies. Against the backdrop of the significantly increased clothing production and simultaneously decreased clothing utilization (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017), more ideas to tackle this challenge and the consequences are welcome. It must be noted that sustainable strategies, such as producing better quality, do not necessarily decrease environmental impact, if consumers do not lower their consumption and if the total amount of clothing production does not decrease (Niinimäki and Hassi, 2011; Maldini and Balkenende, 2017). At the moment, the strategy of reducing clothing demand on the basis of product longevity is yet on a conceptual level and requires further research (Maldini et al., 2019). While extending product use time can be argued as a reasonable approach to decrease the excessive production of clothing and to lower clothing consumption, in theory the following question remains: Will consumers purchase less clothing and use their existing clothing longer if they were of better quality?

For researches, it provides a reference to several themes to be explored further. The field would benefit on studies that investigate the connections between the quality, sustainability and garment lifespans, examining, for example, whether consumers will purchase less clothing if the quality was better. Also, as producing better quality might raise the price point, how much would consumers be willing to pay more for better quality. Further studies could also examine particularly consumers’ perceptions and desires on quality requirements; in other words, what exactly is the level of quality they are satisfied with. One stream of research could focus on the challenges related to the evaluation of quality in online shopping, as the assessment does not involve the tactile cues, such as feeling the fabric. More research could also be conducted by exploring companies’ efforts to communicate quality to consumers. As mentioned by Garvin (1988), sometimes an improvement on one dimension of quality may be achieved at the expense of another one; therefore, careful calculations of the pros and cons should be done in order to reach environmental benefits through the possibilities of quality.