Determinants for Consumption Materialism among Late Adolescents in China

Past research examining materialism and adolescence has often focused on investigating the relationship between material-ism and the adolescent’s personality traits and consumption pat-terns (Achenreiner 1997; Goldberg et al. 2003). Further, research-ers found that, from a developmental perspective, parental values are the primary means of socializing adolescents to specific values (Kilby 1993). For example, adolescents that value material posses-sions more than they value self-acceptance, affiliation, or commu-nity feelings are associated with more materialistic and less sup-portive parents (Kasser, Ryan and Zax 1995). In this study, we aim to build on this line of research by exploring historical/environmen-tal factors that could influence the adolescent’s development of materialist value. We investigated this issue in the context of China for two reasons. First, past research has seldom explored these issues in non-Western countries. Also, the dramatic economic an