The Relationship Between Gratitude And Materialism For College Students

As economy developing rapidly in China today,materialism which is the personal values emphasized the obsession of material began to flourish, and has been impacted on psychology and behavior in Chinese people, especially young people. Numerous researches show that excessive pursuit of material will reduce the well-being, so it has important practical significance to restrain this negative effect. On the contrary, gratitude is one of the topics in positive psychology. Owing to the positive functions such as enhancing well-being, promoting mental health, gratitude has received much attention from psychologists. Recently, there were some researches have pointed out that increase gratitude will reduce the level of materialism and its negative effect. Based on this realistic background, the current research explored the relationship between gratitude and materialism.Study 1 used questionnaire survey method. Based on literature review open style questionnaire survey, through steps such as the initial dimensions confirm and exploratory factor analysis, preliminary gratitude structure of undergraduate obtained. In the following official measurement, reliability and the validity of the structure have been tested. Finally, the formal gratitude scale for undergraduate has been established. Study 2 explored the relationship between gratitude and materialism form two parts. For part one, gratitude scale for undergraduate which was established in study and Richins and Dawson's Material Values Scale were investigated to examine their relationship. For part two, through counting blessing intervened, comparison groups pretest and posttest experimental was designed to explore the relationship between gratitude and materialism among undergraduate.The results show that:1. Based on a Chinese undergraduate sample, gratitude contain four factor: appreciation for benefit, sense of abundance, simple appreciation and reciprocation.2. The gratitude scale for undergraduate had good reliability and the validity, which can be used as a tool to measure gratitude.3. Gratitude was signification negatively correlated to materialism.4. Compare to low gratitude undergraduate, the materialism level of high gratitude undergraduate was much lower.5. After counting blessing task, gratitude of undergraduate was significantly increased, while the level of materialism was significantly reduced.