Effects of Materialism, Appearance Orientation, and Money Attitude on Adolescent Consumers' Impulsive Buying Behavior Tendency

Autor: Kai-Ting Shih, 石凱婷
Rok vydání: 2008
Druh dokumentu: 學位論文 ; thesis
Popis: 96
In the modern society, consumer behavior becomes a critical developmental task during adolescence. Because early development has strong impact on later resulting consumer behavior in adulthood, the study of a typical adolescent consumer behavior, impulsive buying tendency, is important for the comprehensive understanding of adult consumer behavior as well as the basic illustration of financial/economic perspectives of adolescent development. Adolescent is characterized as the crucial developmental period of the self and self identity. Teenagers struggling to pursuit a self portrait often reach a simple, concrete, maybe superficial definition about self by the observation of what themselves possess (materialism), what themselves buy (consumer behavior), and what themselves look like (body image). Materialism is conceptualized by Richins and Dawson (1992) as a kind of value and the extension of self portrait. People of high materialism tend to revolve around possessions and ownership as the main dimension of human-material object relationship. It guides people's choices and conduct in a variety of situations, including, but not limited to, consumption arenas. Materialism composes three dimensions or “orienting values”: (a) acquisition centrality (materialists place possessions and their acquisition at the center of their lives), (b) acquisition as the pursuit of happiness (people view possessions and their acquisition as essential to their satisfaction and well-being in life), and (c) possession defined success (materialists tend to judge their own and others' success by the number and quality of possessions accumulated). How people visualize their body (body image) is of interest to scholars who study self concept. These issues are of particular concern during adolescence, not only because adolescence is an important period for forming views about self and sociocultural ideals, but also because the onset of puberty entails bodily changes. Negative body image, especially in women, has been empirically related to depression, anxiety, lowered self-esteem, plastic surgery, and increased buying for items claiming to guarantee weight loss and beauty. This study particularly chose “appearance orientation” (Cash, 1990), a dimension of multi-perspective body image, as research focus. Appearance orientation describes the importance one places on appearance, grooming, spending much time for looking good, and the willingness of investment in one’s appearance. The author believes higher concern about appearance may arouse tendency of impulsively purchasing clothing, weight control medicines, cosmetics, and other goods to shape a better exterior-looking. Money attitude (Yamauchi & Templer, 1982) stands for individual’s personal/psychological meanings of money which is essentially independent of a person's income. The construct comes from clinical literature with theory base of psychodynamic formulations such as the relationship of money retention to the obsessive-anal character structure. Money attitude composes multidimensional perspectives, (a) security feelings (optimism, confidence, comfort) with money; (b) retention about money, including parsimony, hoarding and obsessive personality traits; and (c) power-prestige thinking about money, comprising status, importance, superiority, and acquisition of money. Therefore, this study aims to explore adolescents’ self development through impulsive buying tendency (the way one gets one’s) and its relations with materialism (the internalized value one places on one’s), appearance orientation (how much one concerns about bodily one), and money attitude (how one place meaning one financial one’s). Firstly this study explored the natures of Taiwan adolescent impulsive buying tendency using a structural open-ended questionnaire designed by the author. The content analysis of the texts from the open-ended questionnaire was used to modify the Scale of Adolescent Impulsive Buying Tendency (SAIBT) originally designed by Rook and Fisher (1995). Then measures of materialism (Richins & Dawson, 1992), appearance orientation (Cash, 1990) and money attitude (Yamauchi & Templer, 1982), as well as demographic/background factors were adopted to identify the precedents of impulsive buying tendency in a sample of Taiwan adolescents. Demographic/background factors included in this study were sex, grade, school type (high school versus vocational high school), schedule of pocket money (none, regular, irregular), amount of pocket money, part-time job (yes/no), and money saving habit (yes/no). The participants were 642 high school students recruited from public and private schools from north, middle, and south Taiwan. The major results are five folds. First, most adolescents experienced impulsively buying for goods in neighborhood drug stores. The impulsively buying preferences do not show obvious patterns or aggregates; adolescents impulsively buy goods of a great range of brands and functions. Second, in a factor analysis about impulsive buying tendency scale, it resulted in a single-factor structure with high reliability which is in accordance with Rook and Fisher (1995). Third, adolescents in privately vocational high schools showed significantly higher impulsive buying tendency than their peers in public high school. Those without saving habit showed higher impulsive buying tendency than adolescents with saving habits. Fourth, the zero order correlations showed that impulsive buying tendency was significantly and positively correlated with 3 dimensions of materialisms (acquisition centrality, acquisition as the pursuit of happiness, and possession defined success), appearance orientation, as well as 2 dimensions of money attitude (power-prestige about money and worry about money ). It was significantly and negatively correlated with “retention about money”, a dimension for money attitude. Fifth, a regression with factors of materialism, appearance, and money attitude as predictors of adolescent impulsive buying tendency was performed. The results showed that retention (factor of money attitude), acquisition centrality (factor of materialism), anxiety about no money (factor of money attitude), school type (background), and money saving habit (background), listed in descent order of regression coefficient, significantly predicted individual impulsive buying tendency. Based on these results, several recommendations for educators, entrepreneurs and future research were suggested.
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