Consumer socialisation in Jordan: a study of father-child dyads in the convenience grocery and food products

Parents play different consumer roles through developing the general cognitive abilities of their
young children related to consumption issues and mediating the influence of other socialisation
agents such as peers and TV commercial advertising on their kids. There is no research examining
the influence of fathers’ consumer role, based on dyadic responses, on children’s shopping
consumer behaviour related to grocery and food products. The study responds to this gap of
knowledge and utilises the consumer socialisation approach to examine the relative influence of
Jordanian fathers’ communication patterns, the cognitive development of children ages 8-12, and
the structural variables on children’s shopping consumer skill, knowledge, and attitudes that
related to convenience grocery and food products. The study investigates young children’s
perception of fathers’ mediation the influence of TV commercial advertising, revises, and
validates the scales of fathers’ communication structures. The study also investigates the degree
of similarity “modelling” between young children and their fathers resulting from father-child
interaction in shopping milieu.
A combination of exploratory and survey research design is employed to address the research
objectives. Ten-one hour semi-structured focus group discussions and eleven structured personal
interviews face-to-face experts’ survey were firstly conducted to refine the research problem.
Based on proportionate stratified random sampling technique, group interview face-to-face selfadministered
questionnaire and drop-off-pick-up self-administered questionnaire were
respectively employed to solicit father-child dyadic responses (n = 916). The research data were
analysed through six levels of analyses.
The results show that children’s learning of shopping consumer role related to grocery and food
products are influenced by fathers’ communication patterns, children’s cognitive development,
and the gender of children. The effect size of children’s cognitive development is more
explanatory than fathers’ communication patterns relating to children’s shopping consumer skills,
knowledge, and attitudes. The priority of fathers’ consumer socialisation goals is related to
fathers’ co-shopping with their young children and fathers’ mediation of the influence of
commercial advertising on their young children. Fathers’ communication patterns are varied by
children cognitive development, the gender of young children, and household income. The
relative influences of different communication patterns on young children’s consumer role are
chiefly associated with fathers’ pluralistic tendency since Jordanian fathers are more likely
engaged in a high concept-oriented communication structure. The results confirmed that young
Jordanian children imitate their fathers’ consumer attitudes and behaviours in the shopping milieu.
The results fill some gaps in the existing literature of children’s consumer behaviour, afford
several managerial implications for marketers and for future research in children’s consumer
socialisation behaviour, and provide a new opportunity to understand the