Understanding Belgian Individual Investors: Complementarity of Qualitative and Quantitative Methodologies in a Grounded Theory Approach

Abstract

This article describes the methodological reasoning followed while studying Belgian individual investors and shows how two methodological approaches, one qualitative and one quantitative, can together allow to build a real inductive process within priority is given to data and to returns from the field.
How do individual investors experience their investment? Are they one or several investor’s profiles?
Our research explores an unknown territory (Bouchard, 200). Many researches focus on investor behaviour bias and their underperformance. No researches studied Belgian individual investors, few studies used mixed methodologies (qualitative and quantitative) and few studies used primary data. Our research proposes to fill that gap.
Thanks to the qualitative phase (17 interviews of Belgian investors) we highlighted the importance of family tradition and the influence of environment regarding investment decisions; the difference of perception between investors and their environment, qualities of a good investor and their perception of financial intermediaries.
The quantitative phase (706 questionnaires) allowed to discover 5 investors’ profiles in term of behaviour: the followers, the traditionalists, the sleeping investors, the experts and the gamblers.
This article also pinpoints all difficulties met during the research using grounded theory and proposed the solutions used by the authors.