Materialistic young people with compulsive buying issues need just the right amount of spare time to feel happier, according to new research.
What materialistic young people with compulsive buying issues need, new research believes, is just the right amount of spare time to feel happier. Chris Manolis and James Roberts from Xavier University in Cincinnati, OH and Baylor University in Waco, TX say that the perception of a shortage of time, or time pressure, is linked to lower levels of happiness.
At the same time, our consumer culture, characterized by materialism and compulsive buying, also has an effect on people's happiness: the desire for materialistic possessions leads to lower life satisfaction.
Given the importance of time in contemporary life, Manolis and Roberts investigate, for the first time, the effect of perceived time affluence (the amount of spare time one perceives he or she has) on the consequences of materialistic values and compulsive buying for adolescent well-being.
A total of 1,329 adolescents from a public high school in a large metropolitan area of the Midwestern United States took part in the study.
The researchers measured how much spare time the young people thought they had; the extent to which they held materialistic values and had compulsive buying tendencies; and their subjective well-being, or self-rated happiness.
Manolis and Roberts' findings confirm that both materialism and compulsive buying have a negative impact on teenagers' happiness. The more materialistic they are and the more they engage in compulsive buying, the lower their happiness levels.
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Those who suffer from time pressures and think materialistically and/or purchase compulsively feel less happy compared with their adolescent counterparts. Equally, having too much free time on their hands exacerbates the negative effects of material values and compulsive buying on adolescent happiness.
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The study has been published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life.
Source-ANI