Materialism and Social Comparison among Adolescents

Materialism and social comparison are important issues, especially in a Chinese context, and especially amongst adolescents. In this paper a theoretical model of the endorsement of materialistic values and social comparison by adolescents was proposed and tested. A survey of secondary school students in Hong Kong revealed normative peer influence and peer communication were positive predictors of social comparison with friends. In addition, motivation for advertisement viewing was a positive predictor of social comparison with media figures. Social comparison with friends and with media figures were both positive predictors of materialism. The implications are discussed, with recommendations for further research.

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