Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Young Consumers, Volume 14, Issue 3

Welcome to this third issue of Young Consumers for 2013. We can offer you our usual international mix of up-to-date research from Canada, England,Malaysia, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand. The sun never sets on our researchers and here’s what to expect.

Rebecca C. Den Hoed and Charlene Elliott from Canada looked at parents’views of supermarket fun foods and the packaging used to promote them to children. Using in-depth interviews and qualitative analysis they found that parents with high levels of education did not like fun foods for kids and praised “more pastoral ideals of food production and consumption”whereas those with less education were more likely praised fun foods. I’m sure the social implications of this valuable paper are not lost on readers of Young Consumers.

Adrian Furnham from England is well-known as a prolific writer and respected academic in our field and his paper, written with Bianca Bush, with the intriguing title of ‘Gender Jenga’ examines gender stereotyping within the advertising of educational/non-educational children’s games. They found that the factors of gender and racial stereotypes are still present in society and provide an illustration of how advertising and the media influence and shape children’s understandings.

Joyce Nga and Leong Ken Yien from Malaysia explored financial planning among undergraduates. Using various scales in a large quantitative analysis they discovered that personality variables were the significant drivers of financial decision making within this sample.

Kara Chan in Hong Kong looks at materialistic values in children and adolescents. The study was done in Macao, the world’s largest gambling centre. Using a large sample she found that social comparison of consumption with friends was the most important factor in predicting respondents’endorsement of materialistic values, followed by self-esteem. This paper will add to growing interest in the literature on materialism in children and youth.

Natalie Brici, Christopher Hodkinson and Gillian Sullivan-Mort from Australia investigated impulse shopping in adolescents. Teenagers are notoriously impulsive in many areas of behaviour and these authors found clear differences in their shopping when compared with adults. Using qualitative methods they also found that, worryingly this impulse buying was often found in response to stress and mood amelioration

Are there masculine and feminine foods? In their fascinating paper Katie Turner,Shelagh Ferguson, Julia Craig, Alice Jeffries and Sarah Beaton from New Zealand give us answers by exploring the theory in practice of food consumption for young consumers, particularly impression management required to create/maintain an attractive identity to the opposite sex.

And finally we have our regular paper looking at regulatory aspects of advertising to children on a country by country basis. This quarter we look at the European Union with a paper by Michel Béjot and Caroline Bouvier from France. As usual these are coordinated by GALA, the Global Advertising Lawyer’s Alliance and I am grateful to Stacy Bess from their New York office for all the help and assistance she provides with each issue.

I hope you enjoy these papers and many thanks to all our reviewers and contributors without whom these regular issues would not be possible.

Brian M. YoungEditor