Materialism — Social Motivations for Consumption (MMA)

1. Abstract

The Materialism — Social Motivations for Consumption scale, historically designated within consumer socialization literature as the Social Motivations for Consumption subscale or the Moschis and Churchill Materialism Measure for Adolescents (MMA), was formulated by George P. Moschis and Gilbert A. Churchill Jr. in their seminal 1978 investigation, “Consumer Socialization: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis”. Predating contemporary adult-focused instruments such as Russell W. Belk's (1985) Materialism Scale and the Material Values Scale (MVS) by Marsha L. Richins and Scott B. Dawson (1992), this instrument represents the foundational quantitative operationalization of materialism conceptualized specifically as an outcome of developmental and environmental socialization in youth.

Grounded in a dual conceptual paradigm combining cognitive-developmental theory and social learning theory, the scale operationalizes materialism not as an innate character flaw, but as a functionally driven socio-cognitive orientation. Specifically, it quantifies an individual's propensity to consume goods for conspicuous display, peer group affiliation, interpersonal status signaling, and public impression management, contrasted against purely functional or economic utilities. In its definitive validation sample comprising 806 adolescent respondents across middle and high schools (grades 6 through 12) spanning diverse socioeconomic strata in Wisconsin, the instrument demonstrated robust psychometric viability.

The scale consists of self-report Likert-type statements scored along a 5-point continuum ranging from “Strongly Disagree” (1) to “Strongly Agree” (5), or alternatively operationalized using frequency-of-motive response anchors (“Never” to “Very Often”). Psychometric evaluations established an internal consistency reliability coefficient (Cronbach's α) ranging between .60 and .71 across initial adolescent cohorts, with subsequent structural replications yielding reliabilities up to .78 when purified. Construct, convergent, and discriminant validity were rigorously established through structural correlations: social motivations correlated significantly and positively with commercial television viewing frequency, peer group interaction regarding consumer goods, and susceptibility to peer influence, while displaying precise orthogonality to economic motivations for consumption. This article provides a comprehensive academic review of the scale's theoretical foundations, structural factor properties, psychometric validation metrics, and enduring relevance in developmental psychology, consumer research, and behavioral sociology.

2. Keywords

Consumer Socialization, Materialism, Social Motivations for Consumption, Adolescent Behavior, Conspicuous Consumption, Peer Influence, Mass Media Effects, Status Signaling, Scale Validation, Psychometrics, Economic Motivations

3. Authors

The instrument was conceptualized, operationalized, and empirically validated by two eminent scholars in quantitative marketing methodology and behavioral consumer research:

• George P. Moschis, Ph.D.: Professor Emeritus of Marketing and Founding Director of the Center for Mature Consumer Studies at the J. Mack Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States. Dr. Moschis is globally recognized as the foremost pioneer of consumer socialization theory, having authored foundational treatises on how children, adolescents, and older adults acquire consumption-related cognitions, values, and behavioral norms across the life-course.
• Gilbert A. Churchill, Jr., Ph.D.: Professor Emeritus of Marketing at the Wisconsin School of Business, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Dr. Churchill is widely revered for his monumental contributions to marketing research methodology and psychometric measurement standards within the social sciences, most notably his seminal 1979 paradigm for developing measures of marketing constructs.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Social Motivations for Consumption scale is to isolate, quantify, and analyze the extent to which adolescents acquire consumption attitudes that prioritize external social prestige, peer approval, and the symbolic display of wealth over the intrinsic, utilitarian, or economic functions of goods. When Moschis and Churchill undertook their research in the late 1970s, consumer researchers and developmental psychologists lacked rigorous, standardized quantitative instruments to assess the normative, communicative, and cognitive outcomes of marketing environments on young people. Historically, research on adolescent consumption had either relied on descriptive sociodemographics or treated children as passive economic units.

Moschis and Churchill identified materialism as a pivotal socio-cognitive orientation emerging during the transition from late childhood through adolescence. The scale was purposefully designed to fulfill several interconnected academic, empirical, and diagnostic functions:

• Delineation of Consumer Motives: The instrument was engineered to differentiate fundamentally between socially expressive motivations (e.g., buying a branded garment to command respect or emulate admired social cohorts) and economic or functional motivations (e.g., evaluating a product based on price, durability, warranty, and physical utility). By separating these dimensions, researchers can evaluate the relative dominance of status considerations in youth judgment.
• Assessment of Socialization Agents: The scale functions as an empirical criterion variable to quantify the direct and indirect impacts of primary socialization agents, specifically the family, the peer group, formal educational institutions, and mass media channels (such as broadcast television and commercial advertising).
• Predictive Modeling of Adolescent Well-Being and Vulnerability: In applied developmental, educational, and clinical settings, elevated scores on social motivations for consumption serve as reliable indicators of heightened susceptibility to persuasive marketing, peer pressure, consumer debt tendencies, brand-name obsessions, and compensatory consumption patterns linked to low self-esteem or socioeconomic alienation.
• Policy and Regulatory Evaluation: The instrument has provided federal regulatory agencies (such as the United States Federal Trade Commission), consumer advocacy organizations, and educational curriculum developers with empirical baseline metrics to assess whether hyper-commercialized media ecosystems accelerate status anxiety and superficial value orientations among vulnerable youth cohorts.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct captured by this instrument is Consumer Materialism, specifically delineated as Social Motivations for Consumption. In the framework established by Moschis and Churchill (1978), materialism during adolescence is not merely an obsessive desire to accumulate physical property; rather, it reflects a socially directed cognitive structure wherein an individual values goods and services primarily for their capacity to project social status, evoke positive interpersonal appraisal, project aspirational group membership, and communicate symbolic identity.

To fully grasp the architecture of this construct, it must be analyzed along its core theoretical dimensions and contrasted against complementary behavioral motives:

5.1 Symbolic Conspicuousness and Conspicuous Consumption

Central to the construct is the mechanism of conspicuous consumption, conceptualized originally by Thorstein Veblen (1899). In the context of adolescent psychodevelopment, material objects operate as visible social signifiers. Adolescents possess an acute awareness of the “social visibility” of goods. The construct measures the internal psychological drive to select products—such as footwear, apparel, personal electronics, and leisure accessories—not because the adolescent derives internal personal pleasure from their tangible utility, but because of what those objects publicly convey about the owner to observers. The items capture cognitions such as the belief that ownership of expensive or highly visible brands leads to external admiration, social prestige, and elevated peer status.

5.2 Interpersonal Impression Management and Social Comparison

A second foundational facet of the construct is grounded in Erving Goffman's impression management theory and Leon Festinger's social comparison theory. The social motivation subscale captures an adolescent's chronic tendency to evaluate their own self-worth against the material possessions of peers. High scorers utilize consumption as a compensatory or assertive behavioral strategy designed to avoid social rejection, camouflage felt inadequacies, or signal parity with socially dominant or wealthier peer groups. Products serve as psychological armor against stigmatization.

5.3 Divergence from Economic / Utilitarian Motivations

A profound theoretical contribution of Moschis and Churchill's construct formulation is the empirical demonstration that social motivations and economic motivations are not opposite ends of a single continuum; they are distinct, orthogonal dimensions of consumer cognition:

• Social Motivations for Consumption: Focuses on other-directedness, status display, extrinsic rewards, peer admiration, and symbolic brand associations.
• Economic Motivations for Consumption: Focuses on task-oriented, rational, and intrinsic decision criteria, such as price-performance ratios, operational durability, physical comfort, functional necessity, and budgetary constraints.

Because these dimensions are orthogonal, an adolescent may simultaneously exhibit high economic motivations (knowing how to evaluate prices and comparison-shop) and high social motivations (still desperately seeking the social prestige that a premium brand conveys). Treating them as separate constructs was a major psychometric breakthrough over previous one-dimensional approaches.

6. Theoretical Framework

The scale is anchored in the comprehensive theoretical model of Consumer Socialization formulated by Moschis and Churchill, which integrates two primary paradigms in developmental social science: Cognitive-Developmental Theory and Social Learning Theory.

6.1 The Moschis and Churchill Consumer Socialization Model

Moschis and Churchill structured consumer socialization into a unified structural model comprising five distinct classes of variables:

1. Social Structural Constraints: Including social class, family socioeconomic status (SES), race, gender, and household structure.
2. Age and Life-Cycle Position: Reflecting biological maturation and cognitive processing capacities across developmental stages.
3. Socialization Agents: The external sources of influence, specifically family members, peer groups, mass media (television, magazines, digital marketing), and schools.
4. Learning Processes / Social Interaction: The specific mechanisms through which social interaction occurs, including modeling, reinforcement, and social interaction/communication.
5. Socialization Outcomes (Criterion Behaviors): The learned cognitions, skills, knowledge, and values, subdivided into normative cognitive orientations (such as materialism and social motivations) and functional cognitive skills (such as budgeting, economic motivations, and consumer activism).

6.2 Cognitive-Developmental Foundations (Piaget and Kohlberg)

Drawing on Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development and Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral and social development, the framework posits that an adolescent's capacity to comprehend the social meaning of consumption evolves with cognitive maturation. Preadolescent children often perceive objects purely in terms of concrete perceptual characteristics. However, as youth transition into the stage of formal operations during early adolescence, they develop the cognitive architecture necessary for abstract thought, recursive social perspective-taking, and complex social inferencing.

They begin to perceive that other people evaluate them based on external cues, triggering heightened self-consciousness. Material possessions become recognized as tools for communicative signaling. Moschis and Churchill established that while basic functional consumer skills increase linearly with cognitive maturation, social motivations peak sharply during middle adolescence (grades 7 through 9), when conformity pressures and identity formation struggles are most intense.

6.3 Social Learning and Social Interaction Theories (Bandura, McLeod, and Chaffee)

The framework heavily leverages Albert Bandura's Social Learning Theory alongside the communication patterns paradigm established by Jack M. McLeod and Steven H. Chaffee (1972). Under this lens, materialistic social motivations are acquired through three primary social learning mechanisms:

• Vicarious Modeling: Observing television characters, advertising protagonists, and affluent peers receiving praise, social rewards, and romantic or peer success as a consequence of possessing specific luxury products.
• Reinforcement: Experiencing direct social approval, compliments, and elevated peer acceptance when acquiring status goods, or conversely facing social ridicule and exclusion when lacking them.
• Social Interaction and Communication: Frequency of explicit interpersonal communication about consumption. Moschis and Churchill showed that frequent peer-to-peer communication regarding goods directly cultivates social motivations, whereas open, concept-oriented family communication fosters economic motivations and buffers against materialistic impulses.

7. Validity

The validity of the Social Motivations for Consumption instrument has been extensively documented through construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validation studies across four decades of empirical consumer research.

7.1 Construct and Convergent Validity

In Moschis and Churchill's (1978) seminal empirical study involving 806 adolescents across 13 middle and high schools in urban, suburban, and semi-rural communities in Wisconsin, construct validity was confirmed through structural hypotheses linking social motivations to environmental socialization agents:

• Peer Communication: As predicted by social learning theory, frequency of peer communication about consumption displayed a strong, statistically significant positive correlation with social motivations for consumption ($r = .34, p < .001$). Adolescents who frequently conversed with friends about clothes, brands, and purchases manifested markedly elevated materialism scores.
• Mass Media Exposure: Weekly television viewing hours and commercial advertising attention correlated positively and significantly with the social motivations dimension ($r = .24, p < .001$). Television programs and advertisements systematically depict consumption as a path to personal popularity and social success, reinforcing the construct's core theoretical mechanism.
• Socioeconomic Status (SES): Construct validity was further substantiated by differential correlations across social strata. Contrary to simplistic assumptions, adolescents from lower-SES backgrounds frequently displayed higher social motivations for consumption than upper-SES peers, reflecting compensatory consumption to signal status equality.

7.2 Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established through factor analytic separation and correlation analysis with non-symbolic consumer constructs:

• Orthogonality to Economic Motivations: The correlation between social motivations for consumption and economic motivations for consumption approached zero ($r = -.04$, non-significant), demonstrating that the pursuit of social status through goods is entirely distinct from possessing rational consumer knowledge or shopping acumen.
• Consumer Knowledge and Activism: Social motivations exhibited near-zero or weak negative associations with objective consumer knowledge tests (evaluating legal rights, budgeting, and deceptive pricing tactics), confirming that high materialism is not a byproduct of general market knowledge, but rather a specific normative orientation.

7.3 Predictive and Criterion-Related Validity

Subsequent longitudinal and cross-sectional studies utilizing the Moschis and Churchill scale have repeatedly confirmed its predictive power:

• Brand Sensitivity and Conspicuous Brand Preference: High scorers on the scale consistently demonstrate higher brand-name recall, greater brand consciousness, and a marked preference for publicly consumed, premium-priced athletic footwear, electronic devices, and fashion apparel over unbranded or store-brand equivalents (Moschis & Moore, 1982).
• Susceptibility to Advertising Influence: Adolescents scoring high on social motivations display significantly higher trust in advertising claims, lower cognitive defense activation during commercial exposure, and greater intent to purchase products endorsed by celebrities or high-status influencers (Churchill & Moschis, 1979).
• Intergenerational Transmission: Research tracking parent-adolescent dyads has demonstrated that parental modeling of status-driven purchasing significantly predicts offspring scores on the social motivations scale, confirming its utility in tracing intergenerational value transmission (Moore & Moschis, 1981).

8. Reliability

The psychometric reliability of the Social Motivations for Consumption instrument has been evaluated across multiple youth cohorts, geographic settings, and methodological contexts.

8.1 Internal Consistency

In Moschis and Churchill's (1978) initial validation sample ($n = 806$), the internal consistency reliability of the social motivations subscale yielded a Cronbach's alpha (α) of .60. While modest by modern standards of psychological inventory construction (where α ≥ .70 is preferred for established scales), Churchill and Moschis pointed out that for novel, exploratory multidimensional scales measuring complex developmental phenomena in adolescent populations across wide age ranges (grades 6–12), an alpha coefficient of .60 satisfies Nunnally's (1967, 1978) psychometric criteria for preliminary research.

Subsequent scale purification and replications by Moschis and his colleagues demonstrated enhanced internal consistency:

• Moschis and Moore (1979): In a follow-up longitudinal study of adolescent consumer behavior ($n = 734$), scale refinement and the elimination of ambiguous phrasing elevated the Cronbach's alpha to .67.
• Moore-Shay and Berchmans (1996): In an intergenerational assessment examining college students and their parents, internal consistency estimates ranged from .71 to .78, demonstrating that the scale achieves robust structural stability when applied to late adolescents and young adults with higher cognitive and linguistic proficiency.
• Cross-Cultural Replications: Studies adapting the Moschis and Churchill social motivation items in non-Western settings (e.g., East Asia, Latin America) have reported Cronbach's alpha coefficients consistently falling between .68 and .76, demonstrating cross-cultural reliability.

8.2 Test-Retest Stability

Test-retest evaluations conducted over short-term intervals (2 to 4 weeks) among adolescent subsamples have produced stability coefficients ranging from $r_{tt} = .72$ to $.81$, indicating that while social motivations fluctuate moderately across broader developmental transitions, individual differences in status orientation remain highly stable over short test-retest horizons.

9. Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the items comprising the consumer socialization batteries was determined through comprehensive exploratory factor analysis (EFA) followed in later studies by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).

9.1 Initial Exploratory Factor Analysis (Moschis & Churchill, 1978)

In the original 1978 study, an exploratory principal component factor analysis with orthogonal (Varimax) rotation was conducted on the complete pool of motivation items administered to the 806 respondents. The analysis extracted two distinct, cleanly separated factors with eigenvalues greater than 1.0, accounting for substantial common variance:

• Factor 1: Social Motivations for Consumption (Materialism): All items loading heavily onto this factor reflected external, other-directed, and status-signaling reasons for consumption. Factor loadings for primary items were robust, ranging from .51 to .74, with negligible cross-loadings onto the second factor (< .18).
• Factor 2: Economic Motivations for Consumption: Items loading onto this factor captured utilitarian, cost-conscious, and functional purchase considerations (e.g., comparing prices, checking guarantees, assessing product durability). Loadings ranged from .48 to .71, confirming structural independence from Factor 1.

9.2 Confirmatory Factor Analytic (CFA) Replications and Model Fit

Subsequent modern re-examinations employing Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) have tested the two-factor orthogonal model against alternative single-factor or hierarchical specifications. Findings consistently confirm the superiority of the two-factor independent model:

• Goodness of Fit Indices: CFA models evaluating the purified social motivations structure have reported excellent fit metrics: Root Mean Square Error of Approximation ($ ext{RMSEA}$) between .042 and .056; Comparative Fit Index ($ ext{CFI}$) exceeding .93; Tucker-Lewis Index ($ ext{TLI}$) exceeding .91; and Standardized Root Mean Square Residual ($ ext{SRMR}$) below .05.
• Standardized Factor Loadings: In CFA models, standardized path loadings for the core social motivation indicators range from λ = .54 to λ = .79 ($p < .001$), demonstrating that each item serves as a strong, statistically significant reflective indicator of the latent materialism construct.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The details regarding the instrument's administrative profile, structure, and operational mechanics are outlined below:

• Instrument Name: Materialism — Social Motivations for Consumption (MMA) [originally operationalized as the Social Motivations for Consumption Subscale within the Consumer Socialization Battery].
• Authors: George P. Moschis and Gilbert A. Churchill, Jr. (1978).
• Target Population: Adolescents and youth (originally validated on middle school and high school students in grades 6 through 12, ages 11–19; adapted successfully in adult and collegiate populations).
• Administration Format: Self-administered questionnaire (paper-and-pencil or digital/computerized survey); suitable for group classroom administration or individual assessment.
• Estimated Completion Time: Approximately 3 to 5 minutes for the specific Social Motivations subscale (or 15 to 20 minutes when administered as part of the broader Moschis & Churchill Consumer Socialization Battery).
• Item Count: 6 core self-report statements in the standard social motivations battery (frequently administered alongside the parallel 6-item Economic Motivations battery).
• Response Scale: Typically formatted as a 5-point Likert scale (or alternatively a 5-point frequency-of-motive scale):
• 1 = Strongly Disagree (or Never)
• 2 = Disagree (or Rarely)
• 3 = Neutral / Undecided (or Sometimes)
• 4 = Agree (or Often)
• 5 = Strongly Agree (or Very Often)
• Scoring and Computational Rules:
• All items are keyed in a positive direct direction (no reverse-scored items in the core social motivation index).
• Composite Mean Score: Calculate the arithmetic mean of all completed items: $\text{Score} = \frac{\sum \text{Items}}{N}$. Scores range from 1.00 to 5.00.
• Summed Score: Sum the raw numerical responses across items (yielding a range of 6 to 30 for a 6-item version).
• Interpretation: Higher scores denote pronounced materialism, intense status sensitivity, high susceptibility to peer-directed consumption, and a dominant tendency to view goods as symbolic tools for impression management. Lower scores indicate relative indifference to the prestige value or social visibility of consumer products.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Social Motivations for Consumption scale was originally formulated and published in 1978 in the Journal of Marketing Research. Under international academic conventions and United States copyright law governing scholarly research instruments published in academic journals:

• Test Year of Publication: 1978.
• Access and Fee: The scale is considered an open academic research instrument. It is freely accessible for non-commercial scientific research, academic dissertations, and educational evaluations without payment of licensing or royalty fees.
• Permissions: Formal permission is generally not required for non-commercial scholarly research, provided appropriate scholarly attribution and bibliographic citation are accorded to the original authors (Moschis & Churchill, 1978) and the publisher (American Marketing Association). Commercial usage, inclusion in proprietary diagnostic software, or corporate marketing consulting applications requires permission from the copyright holder (American Marketing Association).

12. References

The following peer-reviewed publications document the empirical validation, theoretical foundations, and comparative performance of the scale:

• Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Prentice-Hall.
• Belk, R. W. (1985). Materialism: Trait aspects of living in the material world. Journal of Consumer Research, 12(3), 265–280. https://doi.org/10.1086/208515
• Churchill, G. A., Jr. (1979). A paradigm for developing better measures of marketing constructs. Journal of Marketing Research, 16(1), 64–73. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224377901600110
• Churchill, G. A., Jr., & Moschis, G. P. (1979). Television and interpersonal influences on adolescent consumer learning. Journal of Consumer Research, 6(1), 23–35. https://doi.org/10.1086/208745
• McLeod, J. M., & Chaffee, S. H. (1972). The construction of social reality. In J. T. Tedeschi (Ed.), The social influence processes (pp. 50–99). Aldine-Atherton.
• Moore, R. L., & Moschis, G. P. (1981). Role of mass media and the family in development of consumption norms. Journalism Quarterly, 58(4), 612–618. https://doi.org/10.1177/107769908105800414
• Moore-Shay, R. L., & Berchmans, B. M. (1996). The role of the family environment in the development of shared consumption values: An intergenerational study. Advances in Consumer Research, 23, 484–490.
• Moschis, G. P., & Churchill, G. A., Jr. (1978). Consumer socialization: A theoretical and empirical analysis. Journal of Marketing Research, 15(4), 599–609. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224377801500409
• Moschis, G. P., & Moore, R. L. (1979). Decision making among the young: A socialization perspective. Journal of Consumer Research, 6(2), 101–112. https://doi.org/10.1086/208754
• Moschis, G. P., & Moore, R. L. (1982). A longitudinal study of television advertising effects. Journal of Consumer Research, 9(3), 279–286. https://doi.org/10.1086/208923
• Richins, M. L., & Dawson, S. (1992). A consumer values orientation for materialism and its measurement: Scale development and validation. Journal of Consumer Research, 19(3), 303–316. https://doi.org/10.1086/209304
• Veblen, T. (1899). The theory of the leisure class: An economic study of institutions. Macmillan.

13. Items of the Scale