Reports that adolescents learn consumer skills primarily from parents and from newspaper and television contact. (FL)

A longitudinal study examined both the short term and the long term effects of television advertising on the development of adolescents' consumption-related orientations. Questionnaires were administered to 556 adolescents in a number of schools in a southern state; a second wave of questionnaires was administered to a subsample of 230 of these…

Four hundred eight female users of cosmetics in Madison, Wisconsin, responded to questionnaires which sought to discover correlations among the goal of the purchaser and the type and source of information sought in the buying decision. Two goals were identified: rational (cost, functional benefits of product, or possible undesirable consequences…

Children's learning of consumer economics concepts in two types of preschool teaching conditions was compared. Children in the Ausubelian program (high proportion of teacher-directed learning activities) achieved a significantly higher level of performance than did children in the Piagetian program (high proportion of child-directed activities.)…

Presents a study which attempts to link current theory to practical problems of applied communication. The power of coorientational variables is tested and compared with the power of commonly used individual characteristics in predicting the amounts and types of information sought by buyers of cosmetics. (JMF)

A study examined the effects of factors (including television, family, peers, age, and socioeconomic status) on consumer socialization, the process by which individuals develop consumption-related cognitions and behaviors. The specific criterion variables studied included consumer affairs knowledge, puffery filtering, consumer finance management,…

A study of women's information-seeking behavior with regard to the purchase of cosmetics was conducted to determine the effects on their behavior of six individual variables (ambiguity about cosmetic products, price consciousness, income, amount of money spent on cosmetics, age, and education) and six social variables (perceived social utility of…

Results suggest that family communication structures affect adolescents' perception of the communication process. Adolescents from pluralistic families are more likely to have greater knowledge about consumer matters, are more likely to perform socially desirable consumer behaviors, and are less likely to hold materialistic attitudes. (PD)

A total of 734 sixth through twelfth grade students completed two questionnaires in a study that focused on the development of consumer skills, the sources of consumer skill acquisition, the effects of cognitive development and social factors on the socialization processes, and the effects of levels of competency on various consumer skills. A…

Anticipatory consumer socialization is the learning of consumer roles and perceptions, which will be assumed at a later time, such as those that children acquire before they become adult consumers. A survey of 784 adolescents was conducted in a southern state to examine the anticipatory consumer socialization effects of such factors as the mass…

Questionnaires completed by 301 junior and senior high school students provided data for a study of family influences on the development of various consumer competencies, materialistic values, communication behaviors, and attitudes toward marketing stimuli. Family influences were studied in the context of two dimensions of communication…