Editorial
Article Type: Editorial From: Young Consumers, Volume 12, Issue 1
Welcome to our first issue for 2011 as I take this opportunity to wish you all my very best wishes for this new year. We have another spread of international articles for you. I have chosen as the lead article a report from Joshua Fogel and Mayer Schneider from Brooklyn College in New York on their research into student credit card use. What did they find? That students tended to irresponsible credit card use the more disposable income they had. Here is a clearly written piece that asks answerable questions and gives results that should generate more research worldwide. Continuing with the theme of money, we have a paper from Dwane Dean at Frostburg State University in Maryland. Dwane is no stranger to these pages having published before with Young Consumersand he reports on his research into gambling and perceived financial risk with US college students. This is followed by two papers on family purchasing and the role of children and youth. The first is by Anupriya Kaur from Jaypee University of Information Technology in India and her colleague Y. Medury. They looked at the impact of the internet on the role teenage children play in purchase decisions and demonstrated, using a large sample, that these young people have an important part to play in disseminating consumer information from the internet and influencing household purchases. Next we have research from Bahar Isin at Baskent University and Sanem Alkibay at Gazi University, both in Turkey. Their paper looks at the role of younger preschool children in family purchasing and demonstrates that they do have an influence on certain goods. Both these papers provide a valuable contribution and add to the international and cross-cultural literature in this growing area of research. Malene Gram from Aalborg University gives us refreshing insights into the world of advertising to children of theme parks in Denmark. Taking an historical perspective she shows how images of children and childhood have been constructed in this context over almost 40 years. Kara Chan from Hong Kong Baptist University with her colleagues Birgitte Tufte from Copenhagen Business School, Gianna Cappello from the University of Palermo and Russell Williams also from Baptist University were interested in images of women held by teenage girls. This qualitative research conducted with Chinese respondents in Hong Kong gives us important insights into gender roles and identities at this age. Next we have a paper from Mathilde Gollety from Evry Val d’Essonne University with Nathalie Guichard from Panthéon-Sorbonne University, both in France. They investigated children’s perception of colour and flavour of chocolate from a semiotic perspective. This gives us a rare perspective on a distinctively French approach to the analysis of preferences and choice and will illuminate this particular aspect of marketing for readers.
Finally, a practitioner piece from Bryan Urbick of Consumer Knowledge. Bryan is a prolific researcher, lecturer and writer and provides us with a fascinating perspective on children living in the connected world.
I hope you enjoy reading all of these important papers and many thanks to all our reviewers and contributors without whom these regular issues would not be possible.
Dr Brian YoungEditor
