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The purpose of this paper is to establish how consumer knowledge is transferred among family members in multi-generational families, based on the consumer socialisation theory. Understanding how consumers learn about consumption and are socialised as consumers is critical to developing marketing strategies throughout the family lifecycle. Central to current conceptions of consumer socialisation is the idea that individuals make decisions as outcomes of previous socialisation processes. However, socialisation takes place in the meso-level social setting and there is need to understand how these meso-systems interact when it comes to consumption.

Using a social system design and dyadic analysis, the authors tested knowledge transfer and consumer socialisation agency in multi-generation families in Vietnam, yielding a sample size of 654 individuals and 218 families.

The authors demonstrate the role of consumer socialisation agency on consumer knowledge transfer between people within families. The study illustrates that where knowledge is limited, family-related services and household products will be jointly considered within the family.

This study was undertaken within a single country setting, but the technique and findings have wider implications for collectivist family decision-making in other settings. The limitations of cross-sectional research are acknowledged; the method specifically overcomes issues with self-reported measures by collecting data from multiple people within the social system.

Our findings suggest that consumer knowledge and learning is bi-directionally transferred through consumer socialisation agency. In complex new market situations, marketers can target the social system and ensure that knowledge will be transferred between members.

Social system design and dyadic analysis have not previously been used to examine meso-level consumption settings. The results provide unique understanding of consumer learning in social settings.

The emergence of children as a distinct consumer class has led to a stronger influence on the parents and their participation in the family buying process. This paper aims to investigate the different socializing agents of children across different product categories leading to their enhanced pester power.

With the help of a bilingual questionnaire (English and Arabic language), a survey was conducted in Dhofar, Oman. Purposive sampling was used to collect the data from the parents of young children (8-12) years. The collected data was then tabulated in MS Excel and analyzed using SPSS and AMOS 24 Statistical software.

The study found that parents are the strongest consumer socialization agents for young Arab children, followed by friends and internet, and the weakest agent is TV. Arab children use persuasion strategy more often and use aggressive strategy least often to pester their parents.

The study has been very perspicacious in understanding child’s role in the otherwise reserved Arab families. Marketers can make use of this finding and can develop marketing communications with more appropriate content.

The growth of Gulf markets offers marketers a great opportunity to renew their marketing practices and techniques. Still not much has been found in literature to study this region. With this in mind, the current study aimed at analyzing the consumer socialization and influence strategies of the Arab children.

The child is at the centre of all Models of Child Health Appraised research and indeed all primary care delivery for children. Appraising models of primary care for children is incomplete without ensuring that experiences of primary care, design, treatment, management and outcomes are optimal for the child. However, the principle of child centricity is not implicit in many healthcare systems and in many aspects of life, yet it is extremely important for optimal child health service design and child health. By exploring the changing concept of ‘childhood’, we understand better the emergence of the current attitude towards children and their role in today’s Europe and the evolution of child rights. Understanding child centricity, and the role of agents acting on behalf of the child, allows us to identify features of children’s primary care systems that uphold the rights of a child to optimum health. This is placed against the legal commitments made by the countries of the European Union and European Economic Area to ensure that children’s rights are respected.

This paper recovers some theoretical elements of the sociology of childhood in the Anglo-Saxon field, to discuss their contributions, scopes and limits about child agency in children living in poor and urban contexts, in Latin America. The objective is to contribute to the debates within the field of childhood from a sociological perspective that accentuate the capacity of action and resistance of children even in the framework of structural restrictions, without assuming a decontextualized and ideal approach about the agency.

Children’s voices are seldom heard directly. Most often, children, particularly young children, are represented by adults acting on their behalf who may or may not best represent the child’s views or best interests. This can be beneficial or problematic, if the child’s needs are not appreciated or recognised. This chapter looks at the changing attitudes to listening to young people, and the growing recognition of the value of children’s needs, as well as the growing voices of the children themselves, who make their needs increasingly clear. The results of our Models of Child Health Appraised (MOCHA) interviews with children and young people via the DIPEx International organisation give us clear direction as to the importance children using primary care services place on being taken seriously, being listened to and being able to make their own decisions. Other researchers asked input from primary care professionals on children’s autonomy and how the current and future primary care systems can best address the needs of young people, as well as the placing of these issues in a wider cultural context, and how this influences and is influenced by children’s choices. Finally, we look at how the MOCHA country agents have reported the assessment of the importance and function of listening to young people in our research.

The purpose of this paper is to report an empirical study on children's buying behaviour in China, with a special focus on their information sources.

The key literature on consumer socialisation of children is reviewed. Primary data were collected from a sample of 155 children aged ten‐13 using questionnaire survey. Various statistical methods such as Pearson correlation and tests were employed to analyse the data.

Chinese children regard television commercials as an important information source for new products. However, they place greater level of trust in interpersonal information sources, especially in their parents who are perceived as the most credible information source with respect to their learning about new food products.

The paper has made a contribution to the extant literature on Chinese children as consumer. The findings would be valuable in assisting companies, specially those in the food industry, to have a better understanding of Chinese children's buying behaviour.

The purpose of this paper is to understand, from children's perspectives, the commercial marketing strategy of selling breakfast cereals with “insert toys” targeted at children.

The study is based on four focus group interviews conducted with 16 children (8‐9 years of age) concerning 18 different breakfast cereal packages. The theoretical framework integrates childhood sociology, critical discourse analysis and talk‐in‐interaction. This theoretical and methodological combination is used to show how children, in local micro settings of talk, make use of the discourses that are available to them to produce and reproduce social and cultural values about marketing with “insert toys”.

The present findings suggest that, from children's perspectives, “insert toys” are constituted by cultural and social patterns extending far beyond the “insert toy” itself. For example, the analysis shows that it is not biological age that defines what and how consumption is understood.

The focus group material provides understandings of marketing strategies and consumption practices from children's perspectives. When the children talk about children and adults, hybrid agents of the “child‐adult”, the “adult‐child” and the “childish child” are constructed. These hybrids contradict research that dichotomizes children and adults likewise children's understandings of consumption based on age stages. Accordingly, age is rationalized into an empirically investigated category rather than being used as a preset category set out to explain children's behaviours.

Analysis of the focus group interactions shows that the way the market and marketing as well as children and adults are talked about is crucial to understanding children's and parents' actions as consumers.

The research reported here was a first attempt to determine where Chinese children as consumers learn information about new products and their attitudes toward different sources of information. Chinese children’s usage of the mass media was also examined, as was the relationship between mass media usage and information sources. The findings show that Chinese children utilize a wide variety of information sources to learn about new products including parents, retail outlets, and the mass media, and surprisingly they consider the newest medium, television, to be the most important of all. The effects of gender, age and family occupation were also considered. Some important marketing implications are suggested.

Research on consumer socialisation emphasises the role played by different agents as well as the influence of the context in which socialisation takes place. As part of the fight against obesity, this study on the nutritional learning of children seeks to focus specifically on social interactions in the standardised context of the school cafeteria in France. It aims to show how and through what social interactions children learn the rules related to food consumption to identify levers by which to promote healthy eating.

The study was conducted in a French school cafeteria among children aged seven to 11. A qualitative methodology was used. It included direct observations of children when selecting and eating their meals and open interviews. A systematic survey of the components of children's food trays completes this work.

This work demonstrated the existence of various types of rules and social interactions. Adults appear to be the guarantors of institutional rules (related to the composition of the plates) and cultural rules (not to waste). Peers were marginally involved in the selection of products. The standards of taste and individual preferences indeed appear to be the background to the choices.

From an academic point of view, the paper supports consumer socialisation studies and emphasizes the importance of a systemic approach to human development. In particular, it enriches the research on food learning by showing how social interactions are involved in compliance with institutional rules and cultural norms.