What’s Materialism? Testing the Two Dominant Perspectives on Materialism

Materialism is defined as “the importance a consumer attaches to worldly possessions” (Belk, 1984, p. 291). However, scholars (e.g., Larsen, Sirgy, & Wright, 1999; Shrum et al., 2012) have noted that the existing conceptualizations of materialism, and by extension measurement scales, have several drawbacks such as negative priori association and poor scale reliability (Larsen et al., 1999)

A novel approach to model cumulative stress:Area under the s-factor curve

OBJECTIVE: Using a large longitudinal sample of adults from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study, the present study extended a recently developed hierarchical model to determine how best to model the accumulation of stressors, and to determine whether the rate of change in stressors or traditional composite scores of stressors are stronger predictors of health outcomes.METHOD: We used factor analysis to estimate a stress-factor score and then, to operationalize the accumulation of stressors we examined five approaches to aggregating information about repeated exposures to multiple stressors. The predictive validity of these approaches was then assessed in relation to different health outcomes.RESULTS: The prediction of chronic conditions, body mass index, difficulty with activities of daily living, executive function, and episodic memory later in life was strongest when the accumulation of stressors was modeled using total area under the curve (AUC) of estimated factor scores, compared to composite scores that have traditionally been used in studies of cumulative stress, as well as linear rates of change.CONCLUSIONS: Like endogenous, biological markers of stress reactivity, AUC for individual trajectories of self-reported stressors shows promise as a data reduction technique to model the accumulation of stressors in longitudinal studies. Overall, our results indicate that considering different quantitative models is critical to understanding the sequelae and predictive power of psychosocial stressors from midlife to late adulthood.</p

What’s Materialism? Testing the Two Dominant Perspectives on Materialism

Materialism is defined as “the importance a consumer attaches to worldly possessions” (Belk, 1984, p. 291). However, scholars (e.g., Larsen, Sirgy, & Wright, 1999; Shrum et al., 2012) have noted that the existing conceptualizations of materialism, and by extension measurement scales, have several drawbacks such as negative priori association and poor scale reliability (Larsen et al., 1999).</p

What is materialism? Testing two dominant perspectives on materialism in the marketing literature

Materialism is defined as the importance an individual attaches to worldly possessions, which has been considered as an important construct in consumer behavior and marketing literature. There are two dominant perspectives on individual materialism in the marketing literature that focus on (1) personality traits or (2) individual personal values. However, several scholars have questioned the aforementioned materialism conceptualizations. Therefore, the present study directly compares the constructs of personality materialism and value materialism. Structural equation modeling was employed to address the following issues: (1) what are the key conceptual dimensions of materialism, (2) how much do they overlap, and (3) what is their discriminant validity in predicting outcomes linked to materialism. We suggest these two dominant perspectives on individual materialism are two distinct constructs, as they shared only 21 percent of common variance. Furthermore, we stress the multi-faceted nature of materialism, with an emphasis on future research directions related to materialism in marketing

Does Sleep Loss Impair Theory of Mind?

An experimental test of whether at-home sleep restriction impairs theory of min