Furniture Design Decision‐Making Constructs

The underlying constructs which influence criteria used to determine furniture design preferences were examined for 155 subjects living in Washington and Or egon. In addition, significant relationships between the self-conceptual person ality trait of self-monitoring and furniture preferences were examined. Subjects responded to three sets of furniture style examples representing traditional, con temporary, and country stylistic variations through the use of a semantic differen tial scale of 15 sets of descriptive bi-polar adjectives. Factor analysis with varimax rotation was used to identify significant underlying constructs of furniture prefer ence within and across furniture styles. Three factors were identified as important criteria for furniture preference: the perceived currency of the style, the per ceived aesthetics/utility of the style, and the perceived prestige of the style. Sig nificant relationships between individual self-monitoring characteristics and fur niture preferences were investigated by using a t-test to compare mean scores of subjects who were classified as high and low self-monitors by a median split. The traditional style was perceived as more aesthetically pleasing by high self-mon itors than by low self-monitors; the contemporary style was perceived as more prestigious by high self-monitors than by low self-monitors; and the country style showed no significant differences in perception between high and low self-mon itors.