The study was conducted by Joseph Lobo, Wendy T. Cortez, and Loui Maie C. Rivera of Bulacan State University, with Lobo also affiliated with INTI International University in Malaysia. Their setting was unusual and deliberately chosen: the Physical Activity Towards Health and Fitness (PATH-Fit) courses that Filipino undergraduates must complete. In this environment, sportswear is not a discretionary fashion statement but a practical requirement for movement, participation, and confidence in physically active coursework. The researchers framed the purchase decision through the lens of behavioral economics, treating each sportswear purchase as an everyday negotiation between functional need, budget constraint, and identity-related preference rather than a simple act of taste.

The data came from a cross-sectional survey administered online between October and December 2024 to first- and second-year students enrolled in PATH-Fit courses. Of 445 initial responses, 401 valid responses were retained after data cleansing, a response rate of 82.02 percent. The sample was predominantly young: 72.1 percent of participants were aged 18 to 20, with a mean age of 19.17 years, and 72.6 percent were freshmen. Just over half identified as heterosexual women (50.6 percent), 43.1 percent as heterosexual men, and 6.2 percent as LGBTQIAP+ members. Geographically, the respondents were split almost evenly between rural (36.2 percent), urban (34.2 percent), and suburban (29.7 percent) areas. Financially, the picture was striking: 67.8 percent spent less than 500 Philippine pesos—roughly nine US dollars—per month on casual sportswear, underscoring how tight the budget constraints are for this population.

The methodological rigor behind these numbers deserves attention. The researchers calculated that a minimum of 365 participants was needed based on institutional enrollment of roughly 7,000 PATH-Fit students, using a 95 percent confidence level and a 5 percent margin of error. An a priori power analysis using G*Power 3.1 confirmed that the achieved sample of 401 exceeded the thresholds required for both independent samples t-tests (128 participants for a medium effect size) and one-way analysis of variance with nine groups (260 participants). The survey instrument, adapted without modification from a validated questionnaire, achieved a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.88, indicating high internal consistency. Fifteen sportswear attributes were rated, spanning fitting, comfort, color, design, quality, fabric properties, figure, price, raw material properties, brand, sewing properties, accessory properties, fashion, advertisement and promotion, and peer influence.

The descriptive results tell a clear story. Comfort scored highest at 4.70 on a five-point scale, followed closely by quality at 4.67, fabric properties at 4.43, fitting at 4.38, and price at 4.26—all interpreted as very important. Attributes such as design, color, fashion, figure, raw material properties, sewing properties, and accessory properties fell into the important category, with means between 3.44 and 3.99. At the bottom of the hierarchy sat brand (3.07), advertisement and promotion (3.27), and peer influence (3.23), all rated only moderately important. In behavioral economics terms, students evaluated sportswear primarily through utilitarian and value-sensitive criteria, with symbolic and socially transmitted cues playing a distinctly secondary role.

But the averages conceal meaningful heterogeneity beneath the surface. When the researchers ran independent samples t-tests and one-way ANOVAs across sexual identity, age, year level, geographic area, and monthly expenditure, significant group differences emerged for several attributes. Heterosexual women rated comfort, quality, fabric properties, price, and sewing properties significantly higher than heterosexual men, with post hoc mean differences ranging from 0.200 to 0.353. LGBTQIAP+ respondents assigned greater importance to fashion and advertisement or promotion, rating fashion 0.592 points higher than heterosexual men and 0.556 points higher than heterosexual women. These respondents also rated comfort, quality, and sewing properties more highly than heterosexual men in selected comparisons. The effect sizes, measured as eta-squared, were small—ranging from 0.011 to 0.042—meaning sexual identity accounted for roughly 1 to 4 percent of the variance in how students rated these factors.

Year level proved more consequential than chronological age. Freshmen rated price significantly higher than sophomores (4.37 versus 3.97, Cohen’s d of 0.415) and also assigned greater importance to sewing properties (4.03 versus 3.75, d of 0.272). No significant differences emerged across age groups for any of the fifteen attributes, suggesting that institutional position and immediate budget vigilance matter more than age itself within a relatively compact student population. The researchers interpret this pattern as evidence that first-year students, who may have less disposable income and less experience navigating campus life, are especially attentive to affordability and durability because these attributes reduce the risk of poor purchases in an environment where repeated classroom use makes mistakes costly.

Geography and expenditure each told their own partial story. Across geographic areas, only fitting, color, and figure differed significantly, with small effect sizes between 0.018 and 0.024, suggesting that location shapes appearance-related judgments modestly while core evaluations of comfort, quality, and affordability remain stable. Monthly expenditure produced the most striking single finding: brand was the only attribute that differed significantly across spending groups, with an F-statistic of 3.869, a p-value of 0.004, and an eta-squared of 0.038—small to approaching moderate. Higher-spending students assigned greater importance to brand, suggesting that branding becomes behaviorally salient only when consumers have sufficient financial room to treat symbolic and relational value as actionable, whereas students under tighter budget constraints continue to privilege functionality and affordability.

The theoretical architecture underlying these findings draws on two complementary frameworks. The Theory of Planned Behavior, developed by Icek Ajzen, holds that behavior is shaped by attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control—precisely the forces that operate when desirability, social expectations, and affordability collide in a purchase decision. Identity economics, articulated by George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton, adds that identity enters the utility function itself, explaining why consumers facing similar material conditions may still make different choices because those choices carry social and self-definitional meaning. Together, these perspectives suggest that sportswear purchasing is a hybrid act in which utility, feasibility, and identity are jointly negotiated rather than sequentially considered. The Philippine data support this view: functional priorities dominate, but identity-linked preferences recalibrate the weighting of specific attributes across groups without overturning the broader hierarchy.

The practical implications extend beyond the campus. For higher education institutions, the findings suggest that supporting access to reasonably priced, functionally appropriate sportswear—perhaps through supplier partnerships or student-oriented initiatives—could reduce avoidable barriers to participation in movement-based coursework. For sportswear brands, the message is that university students should be approached primarily as value-sensitive consumers who prioritize comfort, durability, fit, and affordability over branding or promotional appeal alone, though targeted strategies that acknowledge identity expression and fashion consciousness among specific segments may still find traction. The researchers caution that their sample came from a single institution, relied on self-reported responses, and used purposive sampling, all of which limit generalizability. Future work across multiple institutions, longitudinal designs tracking how preferences shift as students progress, and mixed-methods approaches exploring how students interpret comfort, affordability, and identity in their own words could deepen the picture. For now, the study offers a compelling, data-driven portrait of how young consumers in a physically demanding educational setting weigh what a garment does against what it says— and find that what it does matters far more.

Subject of Research: Consumer attribute prioritization and sociodemographic variation in sportswear purchasing among Filipino university students

Article Title: Sportswear preferences and purchase decisions among Filipino university students: a sociodemographic analysis

Article References: Lobo, J., Cortez, W. T., & Rivera, L. M. C. (2026). Sportswear preferences and purchase decisions among Filipino university students: a sociodemographic analysis. Frontiers in Behavioral Economics, 5, Article 1809068. https://doi.org/10.3389/frbhe.2026.1809068

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frbhe.2026.1809068

Keywords: sportswear, consumer behavior, behavioral economics, university students, Philippines, purchase decisions, physical education, brand preference, budget constraints, identity economics, survey research, consumer preferences

The researchers started from a well-established idea in consumer psychology: perceived risk theory. Since the 1960s, scholars have recognized that buyers do not simply weigh benefits; they also mentally simulate everything that could go wrong. A purchase can fail financially, functionally, socially, or psychologically, and the anticipation of those failures shapes decisions just as powerfully as any advertised advantage. What Sobhanifard and Molavi suspected was that green products carry an unusually heavy load of such perceived risks — risks that traditional models of sustainable consumption have tended to underestimate or ignore. If consumers hesitate at the shelf, the hesitation may have less to do with weak environmental values and more to do with a private, often unspoken calculus of what they stand to lose.

To test that idea, the team built a mixed-methods design that unfolded in three stages. First, they conducted a systematic review of the existing literature on green consumption and perceived risk, combing through prior studies to assemble a candidate list of risk factors. Second, they interviewed nine experts in the field and applied thematic analysis to those conversations, refining and expanding the list until it captured the full landscape of consumer anxieties. The result was a set of 21 distinct perceived risk factors — a far more granular taxonomy than the handful of risk categories found in classic textbooks. The factors ranged from the familiar, such as higher purchase price and doubts about product quality, to the subtle and rarely studied, such as the fear of being seen as a show-off for buying green, or the anxiety of not being able to explain a product’s environmental features to friends and family.

The third stage moved from theory to measurement. The researchers administered a structured questionnaire to 642 consumers in Iran, asking each respondent to rate, on a scale from 1 to 10, how strongly every one of the 21 factors discouraged them from purchasing green products. The questionnaire was deliberately concrete: rather than asking abstract questions about environmental concern, it asked about specific worries — whether a brand’s claims seemed believable, whether after-sales service and repairs would be adequate, whether the product might trigger health problems, whether buying it would demand extra time and effort spent comparing options and researching credentials. Respondents also reported demographic details and the share of household purchasing decisions they personally controlled, allowing the researchers to anchor their risk ratings in real shopping roles.

When the survey data came back, the team applied Exploratory Factor Analysis, a statistical technique that searches for hidden structure in a cloud of correlated variables. The analysis revealed that the 21 risk factors were not an undifferentiated list; they clustered into four underlying dimensions. The first, labeled Personal Factors, gathered the intimate, self-directed worries — including a construct the authors introduce as internal failure feeling, the anxiety, disappointment, or loss of self-esteem a buyer anticipates after a purchase goes wrong. The second dimension, Information and Trust, captured doubts about the credibility of product claims, the reliability of brands, and the honesty of green marketing, including the ever-present specter of greenwashing. The third, Environmental Assurance, reflected uncertainty about whether green products genuinely deliver on their ecological promises, from recyclable packaging to verifiable environmental performance. The fourth, Quality Expectations and Purchase Value, bundled concerns about durability, performance, limited variety, unfashionable design, and the nagging sense that a green product might simply be worse than its conventional rival.

Ranking the risks was where the study made its most distinctive methodological move. Instead of relying on regression coefficients or expert judgment alone, the researchers turned to Random Forest, a machine-learning algorithm that builds hundreds of decision trees on random subsets of the data and aggregates their predictions. Random Forest is prized for its robustness and for its ability to quantify the relative importance of each input variable, even when variables interact in nonlinear ways — exactly the situation one expects when psychological, social, and financial worries combine to influence a single purchase decision. Running the algorithm on the survey responses produced a clear hierarchy of barriers, and the six most influential risk factors emerged as internal failure feeling, unreliable information, brand distrust, additional effort, low variety and not being fashionable, and lack of reliable organizations and certifications.

Several of these findings deserve close attention. The top-ranked factor, internal failure feeling, is a novel construct in the green consumption literature, and its prominence suggests that the emotional stakes of buying green are higher than most models assume. A consumer who pays a premium for an eco-friendly product and then feels let down does not merely lose money; the authors suggest the buyer may experience a personal sense of failure, a wound to self-image that makes future green purchases even less likely. Equally striking is the weight placed on trust-related risks. Unreliable information and brand distrust ranked second and third, and the absence of credible certifications and verification organizations ranked sixth. In an environment saturated with vague environmental claims, consumers appear to be making a rational response: when they cannot verify a product’s green credentials, they default to skepticism, and skepticism kills the sale.

The remaining top barriers point to friction in the shopping experience itself. Additional effort — the extra time and energy needed to find, compare, and research green alternatives — acts as a silent tax on sustainable choices, one that conventional products do not impose. And the perception that green products offer low variety and lag behind current fashion suggests that sustainability still carries an aesthetic penalty in consumers’ minds, a stereotype that better design and marketing could directly attack. Together, the six barriers sketch a portrait of the hesitant green consumer: not indifferent to the environment, but wary of being deceived, disappointed, embarrassed, or exhausted by the act of buying responsibly.

The study’s implications extend well beyond Iran, even though its empirical base is a single national sample of 642 consumers — a limitation the authors’ framework does not erase, and one reason readers should treat the specific rankings as a hypothesis to be tested in other markets rather than a universal law. Still, the practical recipe that emerges is concrete. Policymakers could narrow the trust gap by establishing and enforcing credible certification schemes, so that a green label on a package means something a shopper can verify. Manufacturers could reduce internal failure feelings by guaranteeing performance and offering money-back protections, and could shrink the effort barrier by making green options easier to find and compare. Marketers, meanwhile, face the most delicate task: rebuilding brand credibility in a marketplace where exaggerated claims have taught consumers to doubt. The green gap, this research suggests, will not close through more appeals to conscience. It will close when buying green stops feeling like a gamble.

Subject of Research: Perceived risk factors in sustainable consumption and the green gap between consumer intentions and purchasing behavior

Article Title: Bridging the green gap through understanding the role of perceived risks in sustainable consumption decisions

Article References: Sobhanifard, Y., & Molavi, R. (2026). Bridging the green gap through understanding the role of perceived risks in sustainable consumption decisions. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04767-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04767-5

Keywords: green gap, perceived risk, sustainable consumption, green products, consumer behavior, greenwashing, Random Forest, exploratory factor analysis, brand trust, environmental psychology, green certifications, purchase decisions