As an emerging value, materialism helps explain the consumer behavior of youth. Using a national sample of 9to 14-year-olds, in this study we developed a Youth Materialism Scale. The findings suggest that more materialistic youth tend to shop more and save less. They are most interested in new products and most responsive to advertising and promotional efforts. Their parents view them as more expert with regard to products and they wield more purchase influence on their parents. Parents who are more materialistic tend to have children who are more materialistic. This study also reveals a modest negative relation between materialism and liking for school and school performance.Children account directly for an estimated $36 billion in sales annually, and when their indirect influence over far-ranging product decisions from stereos to vacations is considered, the estimate of the total economic spending impacted by children in the United States is $290 billion (McNeal, 1999). With 70% of mothers working either full-or part-time, more household-and consumer-related tasks, including helping with shopping for family groceries, have fallen to children. It is estimated that by age 10, the average child makes over five trips a week either to a store or a shopping center (McNeal, 1992). With baby boomers now having their own children, the sheer increase in the number of children is another reason for increased efforts to market to them (Acuff, 1997). The culture in which children now grow up is Requests for reprints should be sent to
The Web is intrinsically a global medium. Consequently, deciding how a Web site should express potentially culture-specific content to worldwide visitors is an important consideration in Web site design. In this article, the authors examine some of the site content characteristics that can lead Web site visitors to an optimal navigation experience, or flow, in a cross-cultural context. In particular, a cognitive frameworkfocuses on the effect of culture on attitudes toward the site and flow. The authors suggest that the congruity of a Web site with a visitor’s culture is a site content characteristic that influences the likelihood of experiencing flow. The authors develop a conceptual model to account for the impact of culture and other site content characteristics on flow and describe preliminary evidence supporting their model.
Consumers trying to watch or restrict what they eat face a battle each day as they attempt to navigate the food-rich environments in which they live. Due to the complexity of food decision making, consumers are susceptible to a wide range of social, cognitive, affective, and environmental forces determined to interrupt their intentions to restrict their dietary intake. In this article, we integrate literature from diverse theoretical perspectives into a conceptual framework designed to offer a better understanding of the antecedents, interruptions, and consequences of dietary restraint. We outline a path for researchers to investigate how restraint behaviors in the eating domain influence a wide variety of consumer psychological phenomena. It is our hope that a collective examination of this literature provides a lens that directs future research on food decision making and dietary restraint and empowers consumers to invest their cognitive and behavioral resources towards healthy eating behaviors.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.