Adolescents and money: values and tools to handle the future

Abstract

The paper investigates teenage students’ values in contemporary risk society and what things they consider to be important to improve their future, with a special focus on materialism (measured by the importance they attach to money). Drawing from Inglehart’s scarcity hypothesis and socialization hypothesis, the paper looks at materialistic and post-materialistic values among young Europeans across two levels: at the first level, it describes general results on values and significant resources for one’s future on a sample of 2.529 European students who participated in an online survey as part of the “Pathways for Carbon Transitions” (PACT) project. At the second level, the paper discusses the results of more indepth analyses on the economic socialisation of a specific subsample of 1.126 Italian students in order to see what factors differentiate respondents’ attitudes towards money as a value and towards money as a tool (using tree model analyses). The empirical support for the scarcity and socialization hypothesis is discussed in the last section, where the importance of directing future research on specific clusters of teenagers is highlighted.