The 5S’s of Consumer Health: A Framework and Curation of JCR Articles on Health and Medical Decision-Making

In this curation, we review many articles published in the Journal of Consumer Research(JCR) that focus on a spectrum of health and medical decisions, while highlighting five (Bolton et al. 2008 Botti, Orfali, and Iyengar 2009; Briley, Rudd, and Aaker 2017; Longoni, Bonezzi, and Morewedge 2019; Moorman and Matulich 1993). We define consumer health and medical decisions broadly, as those relating to the prevention(e.g., minimizing stress, moderating alcohol consumption), diagnosis (e.g., utilizing health professionals for checkups), remedy and improvement (e.g., taking medication to cure an infection), and maintenance(e.g., monitoring dietary intake) of consumer health (Moorman and Matulich 1993). We build on these articles to propose a new 5S (Self, Social, Solution, Service provider, Societal/Situational) framework to explain holistic drivers underlying consumers’ health and medical decisions (figure 1). We hope that researchers will find this conceptual framework useful in structuring the existing consumer research literature on health. Furthermore, the 5S framework provides a clear set of four key directions that future researchers will find worthwhile in undertaking research on health and medical decision-making — either by delving deeper into the 5Ss or by going bigger and broader beyond the scope of past research.