Materialism — Social Motivations for Consumption

What it measures

Part of Moschis and Churchill's landmark consumer socialization framework, the Social Motivations for Consumption subscale operationalises materialism as an outcome of adolescent consumer socialization. Validated in adolescent samples (grades 6–12, n=806) alongside economic motivations, brand attitudes, consumer knowledge, and consumer role perceptions. Social motivations correlate positively with peer communication about consumption, advertising exposure, and television viewing frequency. Economic motivations correlate positively with parental communication and are orthogonal to social motivations — the two dimensions should be scored and analysed separately. One of the earliest empirical operationalisations of consumer materialism, predating both the MVS (Richins & Dawson 1992, id:487) and Belk (1985, id:489) scales by several years. Widely cited in consumer socialisation, adolescent marketing, and intergenerational transmission of materialism research. Social motivations scores predict brand-name consciousness, susceptibility to advertising, and preference for status-signalling products.

Response format

5-point Likert (1=strongly disagree to 5=strongly agree); items summed. Adapted versions for adult samples use the same format.

Scale items

• I want to have a lot of money so that I can buy more things for myself.
• Owning nice things makes you important to other people.
• It is really important to me to have really nice things.
• I would like to have things that impress my friends.
• People are judged a lot by the products and brands they buy.
• I think the nicest things in life are the ones money can buy.

Full scale items shown. Always cite the original source when using this scale in research.

Usage notes & scoring

The Social Motivations subscale is theoretically and empirically orthogonal to the Economic Motivations subscale — do not combine. Higher scores indicate greater social/materialistic motivations for consumption. The scale was developed for adolescent samples; minor wording adaptations may be needed for adult respondents. The Richins & Dawson (1992) MVS (id:487) and Belk (1985) scales (id:489) provide more psychometrically refined measures with stronger reliability for adult samples. The Moschis & Churchill measure remains the standard for consumer socialisation research where the developmental context and socialisation agents (peers, parents, media) are central to the research questions. The full Consumer Socialization Scale also includes subscales measuring Economic Motivations, Brand Attitudes, Store Attitudes, Knowledge of Prices, Knowledge of Advertising, and Consumer Role Perceptions.

Recommended companion scales

Citation

Moschis, G.P., & Churchill, G.A., Jr. (1978). Consumer socialization: A theoretical and empirical analysis. Journal of Marketing Research, 15(4), 599–609.

Keywords