What’s Materialism? Testing the Two Dominant Perspectives on Materialism

Materialism is defined as “the importance a consumer attaches to worldly possessions” (Belk, 1984, p. 291). However, scholars (e.g., Larsen, Sirgy, & Wright, 1999; Shrum et al., 2012) have noted that the existing conceptualizations of materialism, and by extension measurement scales, have several drawbacks such as negative priori association and poor scale reliability (Larsen et al., 1999)