There are two general approaches to the study of consumer behavior.

The inter-pretivist approach treats consumer behavior as a pure social

science where the nature of reality is a socially constructed multiple. It
emphasizes the consumer symbolic and subjective experiences, and
attempts to describe consumers holistically. Consumers are believed to
construct coherent and consistent subjective maps of the world shared
and understood by most people in society. Inter-pretivism also envelop
the post-modern perspective that emerged in the 1980s that points to the
fragmentary nature of consumer self-identity derived meaning
becomes time bound and context dependent. The approach is often
qualitative, interactive and cooperative with the researcher becoming a
part of the phenomenon under study. Above all else, the goal of an
interpretivist is to understand consumers. The drawback of this approach
is that some of the work is abstract and cannot be directly applied to a
marketing context.
In contrast, positivism was the approach that made consumer behavior
into a distinct branch of social science in the 1960s. Under this
philosophy, rationalism assumes the existence of a single objective truth
that can be discovered by science. Early model builders were economists
that viewed consumers as calculating machines seeking to maximize
utility (Marshall, 1890). Later developments in consumer behavior
evolved to include consumer learning (behavioral), consumer
information processing (cognitive), consumer traits, consumer
motivation and consumer attitudes. In the world of commerce where
prediction is used as a means of developing more effective marketing
strategies, the positivist approach dominates. It is not without criticism.
Some argue that positivist research methods are incapable of
understanding the richness of consumer behavior phenomena