Family Life Cycle Model In China

In the west developed countries such as the United States family lifetime cycle is always used as important market subdivide variable, and it's efficacy is proved in many countries and markets. The theory research about family lifetime cycle is in the early stage in China, and there are few research about family lifetime cycle model and application, most people's research used the model of Paul C Glick (1947) directly. But the explanation ability of Paul C Glick's model (1947) is limited to Chinese environment. Not only don't these models include the "main backbone"that is ubiquitous in China, but also just discussed steady wedlock, and didn't take "single parent family"into consideration. It's obvious that foreign pertinent research can't be used in China directly. This is because that the difference of family inner relation and the difference of form and essence of family members contact to outside are decided by the difference of diverse cultures. So it is necessary to establish family lifetime cycle model adapting to China and test it's validity in market subdivision. This text base on Stat. Character of Chinese people (including the trend of family size change, family style structure, marriage ratio, divorce ratio and changing trend of family composing) make the family lifetime cycle model of Gilly and Enis (1982) over, and establish suitable family lifetime cycle model of Chinese environment. The reason choosing the model of Gilly and Enis (1982) is that same direction changing of some indexes proved America family and Chinese family developed to the same trend in the past 20 year. Several indexes are remarkable especially below: family size reducing, the proportion of two member family is ascending, the proportion of over four members family falling, divorce ratio ascending, marriage ratio falling, single-parent family ascending and so on. This entire trend shows that it is reasonable to adjust and recompose suitable Chinese family model according to the family lifetime model of Gilly and Enis (1982) Still and all, we can find the absolutely different existing in variable numerical value by comparing serious-mindedly. These differences include family average member number, main family format defined by member number, difference of marriage ratio and divorce ratio, the proportion of main-backbone-family in family and so on. We establish Chinese family lifetime cycle model suiting Chinese environment by making over the model of Gilly and Enis (1982) basing on these difference and Chinese own vital statistics environment. This model plot out fourteen styles basing on two dimensionality. Even so, this model don't include all family styles however, it is because realistic family styles are complex, any model can't include all styles, but it couldn't in cumber the explanation ability of this model. The vital statistics of 1996 showed the model included 90.64% family. Adapted model already suit Chinese environment, and can describe Chinese family structure exactly. However whether this model can be used in corporations marketing practice as market subdivision variable and how is the effect is the main questions we pay attention to.Therefore we carry through demonstration research, the hypothesis of checkout including: (1) adapted model can predict Chinese family consume; (2) the explanation ability of adapted FLC to Chinese family consume is stronger than any other vital statistics variable; (3) adapted FLC can explain and predict Chinese family consume more efficient associating with other vital statistics variable. 《Chinese cantonal family consume and consumer behavior research questionnaire》is as measuring tool in this text, we collected 320 cantonal families consume data of Changchun and drew main conclusions below by statistics analysis: First, adapted Family lifetime cycle can make good explanation and predict to part family consumes. By making regression analysis to family consume and adapted family lifetime cycle we can concluded: adapted family lifetime cycle can give better explanation and predict to family-clothing consume, family-education expenditure, family-amusement expenditure, traffic cost expenditure, communication expenditure and so on. While it do worse predict to family-food expenditure, inebriant expenditure and medical treatment-health care expenditure. The second, the ability of explanation and predict of adapted family lifetime cycle is just inferior to family income. After compared the explanation ability of family lifetime cycle to other societal economy and vital statistics variable (family month income, family member numbers, family form. education degree of the highest income person), we found: just on the explanation to family-education, adapted family lifetime cycle...