Children's Shopping Skills and Store Knowledge.

Abstract

The objectives of this study were to increase our knowledge of children as consumers and to provide data for the development of consumer socialization theory. The specific areas of investigation were children's knowledge about shopping and retail stores. Data for this research were gathered in a survey of 129 children in southeastern Michigan. The sample was drawn nearly equally from kindergarten, third grade, and sixth grade. Each child was interviewed twice. In the first interview, the children were asked questions about a variety of shopping skills and about retail stores as sources of goods and as marketing institutions. In the second interview, tests of four cognitive skills were administered. These tests measured the child's development in the areas of classification, number, and social cognition. In addition to these data, one parent for each child completed a self-administered questionnaire. This questionnaire sought information about the child's shopping experience, the child's opportunities to observe the parent shopping, parental shopping skills, and parental efforts to provide consumer education. In general, children's knowledge about shopping was greatest for questions that dealt with organization of products within a store, ways of paying for merch and ise, and methods of h and ling shopping problems. They had the most difficulty with questions that asked them to make best-buy decisions based on price-quantity comparisons. Children seemed to have an accurate awareness of which types of stores carried certain products and what stores were examples of certain types. In each case, however, the number of responses per child was fairly low. Children do better when listing examples of store employees. In general, children had difficulty describing the functions of a salesperson and explaining who owns stores. Several independent variables were used to explain differences in children's shopping skills and store knowledge. Age and level of cognitive development were the most powerful factors in reducing unexplained variance. Among the four cognitive tests, number skills, classification, and social cognition were better predictors than conservation of number. Experience and consumer education were positively related to the dependent variables, but observational learning was of no value as a predictor.