Rising materialism in the developing economy: Assessing materialistic value orientation in contemporary Bangladesh

Measuring people’s values Orientation for Materialism has been a popular area for the research in social sciences since 1990’s. Among the plethora of materialism scales, perhaps Marsha Richins and Scott Dawson formulated scale for measuring materialism is the most popular and widely used. This research examines the consumerism of Bangladesh using Richins’ Scale of seventeen items categorized in three variables to measure materialism. Exploratory Research Design is applied to address the clusters of attitudes that may emerge from the data gathered by mall intercept from a convenience sample of 1,259. “Factor analysis” was conducted to devise a valid scale to measure consumerism in this culture. Research findings suggest that a new set of items can measure the level of materialism with acceptable reliability and validity for the culture of Bangladesh. When the relationships between demographics and materialism were assessed, with the exception of age, a non-consistent pattern emerged. Hardly any effort has made so far to unveil the nature of consumerism in the developing economy context; hence, the research may benefit to outline the value shift that leans toward materialism value orientation.