Consumer behaviours in social enterprises: empathy with employees with disabilities and intention to revisit the social restaurant

OpenAlex · English

This research aims to find out why visitors tend to revisit social enterprises employing people with disabilities. The research used an exploratory sequential mixed methods design to achieve this goal. The social enterprise examined in this study is a restaurant where people with mental disabilities are employed. First, qualitative research was conducted through face-to-face interviews with visitors (n = 20). Qualitative findings have revealed four themes explaining the relationships between revisit intention and its antecedents. Secondly, quantitative research was conducted to test the hypotheses developed based on the qualitative findings and the relevant literature. Quantitative data were collected from the visitors of the social enterprise employing employees with disabilities (n = 361). According to the findings, empathic concern and pro-disability attitude positively and significantly affected consumers’ intention to revisit the social enterprise. Both dimensions of empathy, empathic concern and perspective-taking, positively and significantly affected the pro-disabled attitude. Considering that a perspective explaining consumer behavior in social enterprises has not been developed in the literature, this research contributes to explaining consumer behavior in social enterprises by creating the tripartite model with qualitative and quantitative data.