Influence in decision-making: perspectives of adolescent ethical food consumption

This thesis aims to investigate the processes and factors which affect influence in family decision-making, with a focus on how adolescents attempt to influence ethical food decision-making and consumption choices in their families. The study explores family microenvironment and the implications they might have for our existing understanding of family consumption. Although many studies have examined adolescents’ food consumption, few studies have examined children’s influence in family food decisions and none has examined children’s influence in ethical food decision making within the family unit. This indicates that our understanding of familial decision-making process and ethical food consumption is still underdeveloped. This thesis contributes to this under-researched area and is in response to calls for further research to include sibling-to-sibling in addition to child-to-parent influence as part of the family decision-making and socialisation process. Twenty families were purposively chosen, and data was collected through a series of interviews and direct observation. IPA data analysis was used to capture stories of both adolescents and parents. The findings indicate a move away from the widely held view which considers family life to be a similar experience for all, recognising that within families there exist pockets of preferential and different treatment experienced by children and used through different parental communication and parenting styles. Two very distinct microenvironments emerge - parental level and sibling level. Family microenvironment emerged as a moderator of adolescent influence strategies decision-making and the extent to which they can participate in, and shape, decision-making in their families, the parental resistance experienced, and ultimately the extent of the adolescent’s influence success. This thesis has made some progress in exploring adolescent’s influence in ethical food decision-making, the family environment, and family microenvironments, which extends our understanding of family life and how adolescents are socialised within families.