Discovering consumption motivations of families who have involved in voluntary simplicity movement

The concept of voluntary simplicity, which is one of the ideas against consumer society and over-consumption is considered as a lifestyle in which people acquired behaviours towards their needs by restricting their consumption habits. Alongside, creating a conscious consumption, this life style is also affecting the family life. How the family is affected by the voluntary simplicity lifestyle and what are the consumption motivations were determined as the problem of the research. With this research, it was aimed to fill the gap in the voluntary simplicity literature by considering the family unit. Additionally being a minority of individuals who have adopted volunteer simplicity, as the number of volunteer simplicists as a family is difficult to determine, semi-structured indepth interview method has been chosen as the most suitable method for the research. Families who have adopted voluntary simplicity were reached by searching for a hashtag on social media. The sample was expanded by the snowball sampling method through the first interviewed participants. During the interviews, 14 participants were interviewed. There are no refined questions among the interview questions, as voluntary simpler families are reached directly as the target audience. The records obtained in the interviews were transferred to the Microsoft Word program. Through these interview records, findings reflecting the results of the research were obtained. The findings obtained from the study, which is a qualitative research, were evaluated in the results section with the help of narrative analysis. It is determined that 8 out of 10 motivations that families have with a voluntary simplicity lifestyle have been identified as "Reuse, environmentalism, social assistance, peace of mind, use of natural products and production, political attitude, experience and savings". When the literature is analyzed, it was found that all eight findings obtained are related to voluntary simplicity lifestyle and these are included in various studies. In addition to these findings, the findings of "Communication between families and the future for children" are two most important findings of the study and separate families who adopt voluntary simplicity from those who adopt this movement individually. Keywords: Voluntary Simplicity, Consumption, Family Consumption Habits