Pursuing Parenthood: Integrating Cultural and Cognitive Perspectives on Persistent Goal Striving

This article argues that a fuller understanding of consumer persistence, or repeated attempts to achieve goals, is necessary and can be achieved by adopting an interdisciplinary perspective and integrating cultural and cognitive perspectives on consumer phenomena. Developing insights by examining experiences of informants pursuing parenthood using assisted reproductive technologies, we build on Bagozzi and Dholakia’s (1999) model of goal striving to explore how cultural discourses inform consumers’ cognitions. We analyze how both life-project framing discourses and culturally pervasive discourses affect consumers and demonstrate that a cultural perspective is a vital complement to cognitive models of persistence.