The Relationship of South African Consumers’ Living Standards and Demographic Variables with Their Life Satisfaction

Abstract

This chapter investigates the relationship between South African consumers' living standards and their life satisfaction. The author begins by recognizing how people are bombarded daily with powerful messages that the good life is "the goods life" and how advertisements often imply that happiness and well-being come from attaining wealth and from the purchase and acquisition of goods and services. Indeed, materialism seems to have been singled out as the dominant ideology in modern consumer behaviour, among others leading to the use of possessions as an important measure of personal success. The author's findings, collected among participants differing in ethnicity and socio-economic status, showed that purchase decision-makers who had higher objective living standards reported higher satisfaction with life, while across all ethnic groups participants were less satisfied with their lives the lower their incomes were. Differences in life satisfaction were specifically found among consumers from certain ethnic groups. The findings suggest the issue of "what makes a good life" is fraught with cultural assumptions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved). (book)