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Family Communication Patterns and Children’s influence on Family Decision

Making

Wut, Tai Ming,* University of South Australia, edmundtmwut@yahoo.com.hk

Chou, Ting-Jui, Renmin University of China, tchou@mail2000.com.tw

Abstract

World economy has changed significantly in past decades. Parents usually come out to work
and family communication pattern expecting to be changed. The aim of this paper is to
investigate the relationship between family communication patterns and children’s influence
on family decision making. It has been shown that children have more influence for pluralistic
families on the choice stage than protective families and there is no significant difference
between pluralistic and protective communication types for children’s influence in the
decision stage.

Keywords: Family communication patterns, family decision making, children’s influence

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Family Communication Patterns and Children’s influence on Family

Decision Making

Introduction

Chaffee et al. (1971, p331) develop a framework on family communications. Socio-orientated

is a type of parental style that a child has to accept his or her parent values and instruction
without disagreement. The second type of parental style is concept orientated, which is more
open and encourages child to develop his or her own idea. Four different types of
communications: “Laissez-faire,” “Protective,” “Pluralistic,” and “Consensual” are classified
according to levels of two above-mentioned orientations. When both levels of socio- and
concept- orientation are low, it is classified as “Laissez-faire” families. There is lack of
parent-child communication in those families. When Socio-orientation is high and concept-
orientation is low, it is a protective family. Obedience and family harmony are stressed.
Pluralistic families encourage open communication and child’s independent thinking. High
concept-orientation and low socio-orientation is expected. Consensual families focus on both
types of parental styles. There is little research specifically targeting the impact of
communication pattern styles on children’s influence on family consumption. Thus, a new
model is proposed for the issue.

Conceptual Framework

Consumer Socialization is the process children get knowledge and skills in order to become
an independent consumer in a family context. It is under a larger socio-cultural environment
examining parent-child interactions within (Moschis and Churchill, 1978, p599; Rose et al.,
1998, p73). According to Moschis and Moore (1979, p106), parents are the main source of
rational influence on children. Thus, parental style is one of important factor affecting family
members buying behaviour.

According to Caruana and Vassallo (2003), socio- and concept- orientations are two
important parental styles that are likely to affect the perceived influence that children believe
they hold. Chan and McNeal (2003, p324) report that Chinese parents are mostly consensual
with both high scores on socio- and concept- orientations. They conclude that Chinese parents
have strict control over their children on purchasing but give them some freedom in choice of
brands of specific products. The study is conducted in China’s cities Beijing, Nanjing and
Chengdu. A modified theoretical framework after Chan and McNeal (2003, p318) is
developed to predict family communication pattern and consumption decision:

Figure One: A theoretical framework predicting family communications and buying

choice and decision

Family Choice and

communication buying
pattern decision
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It is expected that children in pluralist families would have more influence than protective
families on family decision making. Two hypotheses have been set up in order to test the
effect of parental communication pattern on family decision making:

Hypothesis One: Children influence’s on family decision making is greater on pluralistic than
protective communication patterns for choice independence stage

Hypothesis Two: Children influence’s on family decision making is greater on pluralistic than
protective communication patterns for decision stage

Methodology

Carlson and Grossbart (1988)’s scale items have been modified in order to use as parental
style (concept orientation) and (socio-orientation) constructs in the study. Original scale is
five point Likert scale and this questionnaire is using seven-point scale anchored by
‘7=strongly agree’ and ‘1=strongly disagree.’ The Choice independence scale item used by
Carlson and Grossbart (1988) has been revised from a five item, four point Likert scale to
seven point Likert scale. Kim and Lee (1997) decision-maker role’s scale is used without
modification. Original scale is ‘1=My parents entirely’ through ‘4=My parents and I jointly’
to ‘7=Myself entirely’ in children’s version of questionnaire.

All items for those constructs are chosen for pre-test and reliability of whole questionnaire is
established through test-retest method with two to three weeks interval. Correlation
coefficients among almost all questions in test-retest are significant at least at the p < 0.5
level. This suggests a good reliability of instrument design. Three questions in the parental
style’s construct are discard because their result is unstable. For construct reliability, all
constructs include parental style (concept orientation) and (socio orientation) shows good
results for Cronbach’s alpha. All exceed desired value 0.7.

Samples are collected through convenience sampling. Although a convenience sample is

used, specific demographic quotas are established to ensure adequate representation of
families in Hong Kong. Only those families in which the husband, wife and at least one child
are currently living at home are included in the sample. Moreover, the child has to be at least
seven years of age. At least half of families are living in New Territories, a quarter of families
is living in Hong Kong island and the rest are living in Kowloon side. The distribution is
similar to the actual population in Hong Kong.

The large-scale survey was conducted on February 2006. Since target respondents are
Chinese, back translation is used to ensure the meaning of original questions fully converted.
It is the process of translating questionnaire that has been translated into Chinese back to
English by an independent translator. Minor corrections have been done on the wording of
questionnaire. Data is analyzed using cluster analysis using SPSS statistical package.

Findings and Discussion

After discarding 36 sets of incomplete questionnaires, there are 732 valid sets of
questionnaires from a total of 122 families are available for further analysis. In terms of total
number of siblings, the average for respondent families is 2.03, which corresponds to the
whole population in Hong Kong. The gender distribution of children also approximates that of
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the whole population. Below are demographic profiles of children in the sample. Ages of
children, ranks of children and numbers of sibling in families are treated as control variables.

Table Two Demographic profiles of children

Variables Categories Percentage %

Gender of child Male 41
Female 59

Age of children 7-10 29.5

11-14 40.2
15-18 13.9
19-29 16.4

Number of sibling 1 30.3

2 46.7
3 14.8
4 5.7
5 2.5

Ranking 1 61.5
2 24.6
3 9.0
4 4.1
5 0.8

First of all, factor analysis is performed on the concept-orientated parental style and socio-
orientated parental style together. Three out of seven questions on concept-orientated parental
style and three questions on socio-orientated parental style remain as final candidates for
further analysis. Bartlett test of sphericity is significant since Chi-square value is 1151.43 and
p-value is less than 0.001. Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy is 0.733 is
greater than acceptable level of 0.5.

Data are divided into four groups by cluster analysis according to the ratings on conceptual-
orientated and socio-orientated parental style questions from family members.

Table Three Clusters Analysis on parental styles

Variable Cluster numbers F-value

1 2 3 4
Concept-orientated parental style 4.67 5 3 3 185.12***
Social-orientated parental style 4 5 3 5.33 227.88***
Sample Size 244 178 204 106 Total: 732

*** p < 0.001

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Four clusters have been identified as family communication patterns according to their levels
on two parental styles (Table Four). Cluster centres larger than four would be regarded high
level and clusters centres equal or less than four would be regarded as low level. Similar
result is reached using medium split by Chan and McNeal (2003, p324) and Rose et al. (1998,
p78).

Table Four Family communication patterns

Cluster number Concept Social Pattern

1 (n=244) High Low Pluralistic
2 (n=178) High High Consensual
3 (n=204) Low Low Laissez-Faire
4 (n=106) Low High Protective

From the above table, pluralistic and laissez-faire family communication patterns are the two
common ways in which Hong Kong family members would be adapted whereas protective
communication pattern is not a favorable choice.

Table Five Summary result for Choice Independence and Decision role

Communication Choice Decision

type independence Role
Pluralistic 3.57 (1.65) 3.15 (1.60)
Consensual 4.16 (1.39) 3.01 (1.52)
Laissez-Faire 3.20 (1.83) 3.18 (1.75)
Protective 4.11 (1.68) 2.87 (1.82)

Note: Reverse scale is used in decision role

For pluralistic parental style, children are encouraged to express their idea, which indicates
they tend to choose for themselves. Rather low rating on choice independence confirms the
prediction (Table Five). The second highest rating on decision implies some involvement of
children in family decision making. Children are discouraged to make their own choice and
obey parent instructions for protective parental style. Therefore, highest rating on choice
independence and lowest rating on decision role are obtained (reverse scale on decision role).

For laissez-faire parental style, there is lack of parent and child communication. It may due to
parents usually go out for work and seldom to talk with their children. Children expect to
have making their own decision. For consensual parental style, both communications types
are emphasised. Figures in table five indicate that children are encouraged to make their own
choice and decision. Thus, lowest rating on choice independence and highest rating on
decision role are obtained.

There is significant difference in choice independence ratings between pluralistic and

protective (F statistic is 7.8385 and p value is 0.005). On the other hand, they are no
significant difference in decision stage ratings (F statistic is 2.0754 and p value is 0.1506).
Hypothesis one is supported and hypothesis two is not supported. That means although
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children in pluralistic family have more freedom in search and evaluation, they are more or
less the same with protective family that parents hold final decision.

Conclusion

In conclusion, children has more influence for pluralistic and lassie-faire communication type
on the search and evaluation stage in family decision making and there is no significant
differences among communication types for children in the decision stage.

It is clear that marketers should pay equal emphasis on both parents and their children
because over 60% of samples are lassie-faire or pluralistic families. Children on those
families have less parental influence in choice stage. In addition, parents have last gate of
financial control therefore luxury or relatively high price products should be acceptable to
parents first.

Results indicate that there may be cultural difference between Eastern and Western families,
which are suggested by Chan and McNeal (2003, p318). The study can also be replicated in
other countries such as Singapore, Mainland China or Taiwan where Chinese families are
located. Further research in this area may also include a range of products and services.

Family influence is only one of the important factors in children’s consumer socialization.
Dotson and Hyatt (2005) find that irrational social influence, importance of television,
familial influence, shopping importance and brand importance are five major consumer
socialization influence factors. Those factors vary according to the child’s gender, age,
amount of spending money available, amount of television viewing and how child spends
time after school. There are also other limitations in the results and generalizability of this
research in terms of sampling. The choice of the sample, which is non-probabilistic in nature,
is other limitation. Furthermore, self-reported answers are usually socially biased.
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