Measuring Youth Attitudes on Materialism as a Consequences of a Consumer Society

Abstract

This paper deals with the analysis of young people’s attitudes towards materialism, viewed through three key dimensions: possession, selfishness and envy. In order to examine the attitudes of young people in Bosnia and Herzegovina, an empirical study was conducted on a sample of 206 respondents, aged 20 to 30 years, with an active residence in the country. The results of the research show that, contrary to our basic assumption, young people in BiH are still not strongly influenced by materialism, that is, materialism in young people is not related to their life values, i.e. the perception of their value towards important things in life. It has also been observed that the number of years of youth does not increase the propensity for materialistic values, and that the increased religiosity of young people leads to a decrease in the propensity for materialism. Taking into account all the limitations of the conducted research, the paper concludes that materialism, as a kind of social and cultural phenomenon that is leading in shaping the contemporary global image of society, is not a dominant form in Bosnian society and does not affect the behavior of young people.