Identifying the relationship between parents' and child's car attitudes: For long-term management of car ownership

Abstract

Most research on individual car ownership decision have always asked an individual about their attitudes and norms. Mostly those questions are focused on perceived expectation of others instead of asking the significant others whether they do influence the individual him/herself. In this research, we explore whether the significant others, in this case, parents, influence the decision of students to buy a car or not. We collect data by finding sets of respondents which consist of father, mother and the child. All three answer questions on attitudes towards car ownership. In Japan, for the pilot study, we have collected 300 sets of respondents. We found that the parents’ car attitudes and the respect for their parents strongly influence the attitudes of the children. We also found that mother attitudes toward the car are overall less positive than those of the fathers. However, mother attitudes can explain the child’s attitude significantly better than father attitudes. This suggests that possibly influencing mothers’ attitudes will also influence the children in the long term. Other potential future work, is to compare attitudes of parents and possibly significant others in different countries. Since different context might have different social norms that influence person’s behavioral intention.