Charlene Walters

Charlene completed her PhD in Business Administration/Marketing at Northcentral University in Prescott Valley, AZ and her MBA in Management at St. Thomas University in Miami, Florida.  She is an Assistant Dean of Curriculum at Strayer University and teaches business and marketing courses there as well.

Charlene also has experience working in various management and marketing positions in Florida and California. In her free time, she enjoys pilates, friends, and spending time with her two daughters.

Research Goals

Charlene's research involved consumer internet behavior, specifically analyzing which factors influence female and male consumers to purchase from particular websites. Her study used utility theory to evaluate female consumers’ online purchase behavior according to the influence of the perceived ease of website use, the website’s aesthetics/appearance, online word of mouth/website reviews, prior website visitation/familiarity, and the website’s privacy/security policy. To this end, a quantitative, quasi-experimental study using choice-based conjoint analysis was developed and employed using Sawtooth Software's SSIWeb. Participants included 246 American females and 201 American males who have used the Internet to make a purchase within the past year. Using utility theory, all five attributes were shown to significantly influence female consumers’ online purchase behavior, with online word of mouth/website reviews found to be the most influential with a utility/importance score of 45.94, followed by privacy/security policy (18.13), prior website visitation/familiarity (14.60), website aesthetics/appearance (13.80), and perceived ease of website use (7.522). It was also noted that the two attributes that were significantly higher for women than men were the perceived ease of website use and the privacy/security policy, and that the ranking of the attributes by utility was identical for male and female participants. This findings associated with the study can be used by online sellers to create effective gender-specific marketing and web design strategies.