Household Consumption And Social Identity

In recent years, Chinese’s consuming desires are deeply and widely influenced by the trend of consumerism. Many reports described how crazy did the Chinese shopping when they were abroad, and such behavior did really shock the whole world. Besides, we can also perceive people’s consuming desires in domestic. Originally, November 11th was joked for "bachelor day", but now it has become "the Internet shopping festival". On every November 11ths, the Internet trading record would be broken. Though, Chinese people showed a very strong consumption ability, but in the worldwide, Chinese do not belong to one of the richest citizen. So, why do the Chinese has such a strong desire to consume?Social scientists used to explaining this phenomenon from the perspective of consumption and social status. However, there are several defects in the existing literatures in this field:first, the selection of the object of study is simple, they haven’t taken the variation of the society into account; Secondly, the present studies focus on one single consuming behavior, such as housing consumption, clothing consumption, fashion, they do not consider whether there is heterogeneity between different consuming behaviors; Third, the current study of consumption and social identity is mainly qualitative research, part of the quantitative researches are self-designed questionnaires. The results of external validity should be tested. In this research, based on CGSS2010 data, analyses household consumption on different groups’social identity, and further analyses consumption expenditure structure on the impact of different group’s social identity.In chapter 2 provides core concepts, such as household consumption, social identity and the general theory of the sociology consumption. Based on the theory, four research hypotheses are put forward. Chapter 3 introduces the statistical mode and the research data, CGSS 2010, and also provides the sample description. The fourth chapter and the fifth chapter are the core part of this study, based on multiple regression analysis to explore how household consumption affects different group’s social identity, and further analysis of consumption expenditure structure on the impact of different group’s social identity.As conclusion, household consumption does really affect people’s social identity, and the influence on different groups is heterogeneous. In addition, the influence from consumption expenditure structure to different groups’ social status identity is also different. Based on this study, we found that household consumption has no effect on upper class’s social identity, but the structural factors such as income, occupation, education degree has a strong effect on their social identity. And the groups, whose social identity will be affected by household consumption, the structural factors has lower influence on them. Based on the above conclusions, this paper puts forward that, the government should provide equal and effective public welfare, so as to encourage people to rational consumption and through other ways to seek a higher social status.