The Acquisition of Consumer Skills and Materialism in Adolescents: A Cross-cultural Comparison

Two theoretical approaches--the social learning approach and the family communication pattern approach--were used and integrated in examining the acquisition of consumer skills and materialism in both the American youths and the Chinese youths. Two cross sectional surveys were conducted in which 443 American adolescents in a midwest state of the United States and 712 Chinese adolescens from the largest metropolitan city in Taiwan were studied. The LISREL covariance analysis was used to achieve the two objectives:(1)to examine the cross-cul-tral measurement comparability, any (2)to compare the cross-cultural differences and similarities in the structural relationships between latent varibles in the propsed models Results from the study suggested that there were more differences than similarties int he process of consumer socialization. In addition, the two comunication-related theoretical models did work jointly in accounting for the socialization outcomes.