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Consumer socialisation in Jordan : a study of father-child dyads in the convenience grocery and food products

Parents play different consumer roles through developing the general cognitive abilities of their young children related to consumption issues and mediating the influence of other socialisation agents such as peers and TV commercial advertising on their kids. There is no research examining the influence of fathers’ consumer role, based on dyadic responses, on children’s shopping consumer behaviour related to grocery and food products. The study responds to this gap of knowledge and utilises the consumer socialisation approach to examine the relative influence of Jordanian fathers’ communication patterns, the cognitive development of children ages 8-12, and the structural variables on children’s shopping consumer skill, knowledge, and attitudes that related to convenience grocery and food products. The study investigates young children’s perception of fathers’ mediation the influence of TV commercial advertising, revises, and validates the scales of fathers’ communication structures. The study also investigates the degree of similarity “modelling” between young children and their fathers resulting from father-child interaction in shopping milieu. A combination of exploratory and survey research design is employed to address the research objectives. Ten-one hour semi-structured focus group discussions and eleven structured personal interviews face-to-face experts’ survey were firstly conducted to refine the research problem. Based on proportionate stratified random sampling technique, group interview face-to-face selfadministered questionnaire and drop-off-pick-up self-administered questionnaire were respectively employed to solicit father-child dyadic responses (n = 916). The research data were analysed through six levels of analyses. The results show that children’s learning of shopping consumer role related to grocery and food products are influenced by fathers’ communication patterns, children’s cognitive development, and the gender of children. The effect size of children’s cognitive development is more explanatory than fathers’ communication patterns relating to children’s shopping consumer skills, knowledge, and attitudes. The priority of fathers’ consumer socialisation goals is related to fathers’ co-shopping with their young children and fathers’ mediation of the influence of commercial advertising on their young children. Fathers’ communication patterns are varied by children cognitive development, the gender of young children, and household income. The relative influences of different communication patterns on young children’s consumer role are chiefly associated with fathers’ pluralistic tendency since Jordanian fathers are more likely engaged in a high concept-oriented communication structure. The results confirmed that young Jordanian children imitate their fathers’ consumer attitudes and behaviours in the shopping milieu. The results fill some gaps in the existing literature of children’s consumer behaviour, afford several managerial implications for marketers and for future research in children’s consumer socialisation behaviour, and provide a new opportunity to understand the

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:515922
Date January 2008
CreatorsAl-Zu'bi, Abdel Halim Issa
PublisherUniversity of Huddersfield
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Sourcehttp://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/2016/

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