Elsevier

Journal of Business Research

Volume 64, Issue 9, September 2011, Pages 979-987
Journal of Business Research

Parental responsiveness and adolescent susceptibility to peer influence: A cross-cultural investigation

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2010.11.021Get rights and content

Abstract

From a developmental perspective, this research focuses on how parental responsiveness affects adolescent susceptibility to peer influence both directly, and indirectly, through the key elements of adolescent self-concept (i.e., interdependent self-construal, self-esteem, and self-monitoring). The proposed parent-self-peer model incorporates culture as a moderator. The overarching finding is that in individualist cultures such as Canada, responsiveness reduces susceptibility mainly through an indirect effect by undermining interdependent self-construal, fostering self-esteem, and impairing self-monitoring. However, in collectivist cultures such as China, responsive parenting reduces susceptibility primarily through a direct effect. These findings are largely due to the cultural differences in socialization goals oriented toward individualism vs. collectivism.

Introduction

Parental responsiveness is the extent to which parents use nurturance, affection, involvement, and support in the child rearing process (Baumrind, 1978). Parental responsiveness is an important socialization means in a family (for a review, see Bogenschneider et al., 1998), which is especially important for adolescents, because adolescents are at a stage of seeking for independence from their parents while, paradoxically, striving to remain connected to them (Youniss and Smollar, 1985). At this life stage, emotional connectedness with parents, as parental responsiveness fosters, plays a more important role in guiding the behaviors of adolescents than physical rules and supervision do (Bogenschneider et al., 1998).

Acknowledging the important role of parental responsiveness, researchers associate this parenting strategy with a variety of socialization outcome variables. In consumer research, scholars associate parental responsiveness with adolescents' use of influence strategies in family purchases (Bao et al., 2007). In public policy and marketing research, researchers relate parental responsiveness to adolescents' sexual knowledge, attitudes, and behavior (Moore et al., 2002), credit card abuse (Palmer et al., 2001), and smoking development and progression (Yang and Schaninger, 2010). In the psychology and public health literatures, parental responsiveness is an important predictor of undesirable adolescent behaviors such as early drinking, smoking and drug taking (Bogenschneider et al., 1998, Windle, 1999).

The study here extends the existing literature to examine the effect of parental responsiveness on an under-examined consumer socialization variable, adolescents' susceptibility to peer influence (SPI), that is, adolescents' tendency to look to standards from peers in developing their own motivations, attitudes, and behavior. Previous studies establish the important role of peer influence in consumer decision making. Susceptibility to interpersonal influence, for example, is a key factor in shaping consumers' attitudes, norms, values and aspirations (Batra et al., 2001), affecting product and brand choice (Wooten and Reed, 2004), selecting service providers (Keaveney, 1995), and diffusing information regarding new products (Dawar et al., 1996). However, little is known about how parent–child interaction styles, such as parental responsiveness, may affect adolescents' development of SPI.

Peer influence is critical to advance knowledge about adolescent consumers, as adolescence is a stage when individuals are highly susceptible to ideas and trends popular among their peers (Rose et al., 1998). A better understanding of the potential impact of parental responsiveness on SPI is important to both marketers and social workers. As Rose (1999) points out, parental style is an important segmentation variable. Knowing about the extent to which parents in a family are responsive to their offspring can help marketers distinguish the kids who are highly susceptible to peer influence from those who have low levels of susceptibility. Marketers can then develop different communication strategies (e.g., peer-oriented vs. parent-oriented advertisements) to target these groups. Social workers can also use this information to develop educational programs to teach parents to change their parental styles as an approach to help their kids fight against unwanted peer influence.

Some marketing practitioners start to acknowledge the important role that parental responsiveness plays in adolescent consumption-related behaviors. Social workers, for example, use advertisements to encourage parents to communicate with their teenagers about sex as a way to prevent teens from engaging in risky sexual behavior (Tanner et al., 2008). Organizations such as Tobacco Free Kids have also used advertising campaigns and web sites to teach parents about how to be more responsive to their teenage children as part of the effort to curtail teen smoking (Yang and Schaninger, 2010).

Although little research examines the effect of parental responsiveness on SPI, previous studies in developmental psychology show that responsiveness exerts a great deal of impact on adolescents' affiliation to deviant peers (Oxford et al., 2000), reliance on parents vs. peers to solve their personal problems (Bogenschneider et al., 1998), and following their best friend to engage in deviant behaviors such as shoplifting (Fuligni and Eccles, 1993). These studies provide a solid foundation for the current research to explore how parental responsiveness may affect peer influence at a broader level, focusing on the general tendency of adolescents being influenced by peers in purchasing commodities.

The study here incorporates two additional factors – namely adolescent self-concept and culture – in the conceptual framework: adolescent self-concept likely mediates, whereas culture likely moderates the effects of parental responsiveness. The focus on self-concept as a key mechanism underlying the influence of parental responsiveness on SPI is due to the fact that the adolescent years are a period of self-discovery, a time of transition when children are trying to discover their identity as adults. At this internally precarious time in their lives, self-concept plays an important role in determining adolescents' psychological development and tendency to be influenced by peers.

Culture is a matrix that shapes the nature of interpersonal exchanges in society and provides the context within which parental influences on adolescents play out (Laroche et al., 2007, Leung et al., 1998). Despite the important role of culture in consumer socialization, prior researchers have not studied the effect of parental responsiveness on adolescents' self-concept or SPI across different cultural contexts yet. The present study addresses this gap by focusing on cultural differences in socialization goals between China and Canada, and its implications for the effect of parental responsiveness.

Canada is a typical individualist culture that views the self as a unique entity, while China is a typical collectivist culture that views the self as embedded in group memberships (Triandis, 1995). The overall societal orientation toward individualism or collectivism can moderate the influence of parental responsiveness on adolescent self-concept and SPI. The theoretical framework in this study represents a first attempt to examine the antecedents and psychological processes underlying adolescent SPI.

Section snippets

Self-Concept

Self-concept is “conceptions of physical characteristics, typical activities and abilities, relationships and personality traits, and cognitive and emotional qualities” (Hart and Fegley, 1997, p. 130). From this definition, self-concept appears to be a multifaceted construct that is a result of the developmental interaction between the understanding that adolescents have of themselves and the views about them from social contexts (Oppenheimer, 1990). The study here focuses on three specific

Sample and procedure

The sampling frame consists of students from four high schools in Ontario, Canada, and six high schools in China. With the help of local district school boards, teachers were recruited to hand out survey packages to students in Grades 8–12. The interested students completed the surveys during the regular class time. The Chinese survey is a translation of the English version. The back translation method, in which the survey is first translated from English to Chinese and then back again to

General discussion and future research

Adolescents are often susceptible to the opinions of peers, such as their friends, activity partners and co-workers. Marketing practitioners have recognized the importance of peer influence when targeting adolescent consumers, by emphasizing interpersonal communications such as buzz marketing and opinion leaders (Kotler et al., 2005). And every year, marketers in North America spend over a billion dollars on advertising in youth-oriented channels including television advertising, in-school

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    The authors are grateful to Ashesh Mukherjee and Charles M. Schaninger for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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