Can the youth materialism scale be used across different countries and cultures?

Anna Maria Zawadzka, Agnes Nairn, Tina M Lowrey, Liselot Hudders, Aysen Bakir, Andrew Rogers, Verolien Cauberghe, Elodie Gentina, Hua Li, and Fiona Spotswood

As global material wealth rises and young people are heavily exposed to advertising across a range of channels, including rapidly developing social media where material goods are flaunted as symbols of a happy and successful lifestyle, materialism levels across the world seem likely to rise.

Introduction

Before the 2020 pandemic, global material wealth had risen by US$14 trillion in 1 year alone to a total of US$417 trillion (Credit_Suisse, 2018). At the same time, across the globe, young people's media use has shifted to digital/mobile, with time spent on platforms such as Instagram, Weibo, WhatsApp, or Snapchat (Ofcom, 2019; Statista, 2019). Social media are places where people tend to only portray the most positive aspects of their lives, and where material possessions play an important role in embellishing profiles.

Social media are heavily funded by and lend themselves readily to very targeted advertising which can...

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