Consumer Culture and Well-being Project Research

Our research was designed to:

• Examine the nature of children’s motives for pursuing consumer culture ideals of money, possessions and ‘looking good’ through in-depth interviews with children of varying ages
• Create and pilot-test age-appropriate scales which are able to comprehensively measure children’s consumer culture ideals, appearance and materialistic motives, and strength of identity
• Examine the extent to which the internalisation of consumer culture ideals is driven by external motives (e.g., to increase social recognition and peer status), and how these ideals are linked to well-being as measured by a number of different indicators.  We expect the links to be particularly strong for children with greater feelings of insecurity about themselves.
• Experimentally prime consumer culture ideals and identity in order to test the causal direction of these links (i.e., does a focus on these ideals acutally lead to lower well-being and potentially unhealthy behaviours?).
• Follow children from 8 to 15 years of age, longitudinally over the course of three school years, in order to examine how these links change with age and over time.