Children's Purchase Influence Attempts and Parental Yielding

Abstract

quences, focusing on the impact of television advertising on mother-child interaction. Specifically, we studied children's attempts to influence mothers' purchases of various products and mothers' yielding to these attempts. Some previous research has examined relationships between mass media use, parent-child interaction, and subsequent effects. For example, adolescents' mass media use has been related to parent-child interaction and political socialization processes [2, 6]. Halloran and his associates examined exposure to television and intrafamily communication among samples of delinquent and nondelinquent British adolescents [5]. Little empirical evidence has been found on the extent of television advertising's influence on intrafamily interaction and behavior. For example, while much commercial research attempts to relate mass media exposure to aspects of consumer behavior, little effort has been devoted to explicit examination of parentchild interaction intervening between media exposure and behavior [3]. Research on consumers' family decision making usually focuses on husband-wife interaction and is not concerned with the influence of children [4]. Some qualitative data indicate that mothers feel television commercials influence their children [8], citing the apparent formation of desires for various products. Parents resent the encouragement of overt attempts to influence their purchases, although many mothers are said to accept television advertising as a necessary evil. Such qualitative research, of course, does not explicitly link media exposure to specific family processes. Berey and Pollay examined such processes in mothers' purchases of children's breakfast cereals [1]. While not concerned with mass media influences, the investigators found highly child-centered mothers purchased their children's favorite cereals less frequently than less child-centered mothers. The child's assertiveness was not correlated with purchase perhaps because the assertiveness measure was based on teachers' rat-