Day 054 - 24 Nov 94 - Page 49
1 to how often they exceeded to requests or not?
2 A. Yes, as far as I am aware the IBA did not follow up on
3 that research recommendation, but if I can refer you to
4 reference A2, now on page 4 -- sorry, there is an A and a B
5 in here. I am looking at A where it is page 4 where it
6 says "Grocery Shopping". Now this was a qualitative
7 research of mothers, as we looked at some of this research
8 earlier. I think it is relevant that it is mothers because
9 mothers are the parent who is most closely involved with
10 food shopping and food preparation and food provision for
11 children. This research revealed that women generally try
12 to avoid shopping with their children, both because young
13 children can be handful in supermarkets, and because they
14 often spend more than they intend when they are accompanied
15 by their children who may nag them into buying the products
16 they want or simply slip them into the trolley unnoticed by
17 the parent.
18
19 MR. JUSTICE BELL: You find suddenly that a packet of chocolate
20 biscuits has appeared in the trolley from nowhere, and it
21 is far too tedious to contemplate walking all the way back
22 across the supermarket to put it back on the shelf.
23 A. Yes, but the conclusion here is that, in the main,
24 parents do feel negatively about this. I think the fact
25 that many mothers say they choose to shop without their
26 children is testimony to, in fact, some of the conflicts
27 and negative feelings that parents can have towards
28 children's pester power. The additional expense is
29 obviously going to be of concern, and particularly of
30 concern to lower income households. If we could also look
31 at reference A6 which is another paper by Goldberg and Gorn
32 on page 27.
33
34 MR. MORRIS: What date is this paper -- 1978.
35
36 THE WITNESS: In this paper which Goldberg and Gorn looked at
37 some unintended consequences of television advertising to
38 children, they did look at the possibility that advertising
39 in children requesting products could lead to conflict
40 between parents and child, particularly if the parent
41 denied the child the product. On page 27 in the right-hand
42 column, halfway down they write: "This suggests a larger
43 number of parent child conflict situations developing as a
44 function of TV advertising to children".
45
46 MS. STEEL: Do you want to carry on.
47 A. Yes. "There is little evidence that exposure to a TV
48 commercial would generate more negative feelings towards
49 the parent who refuses a particular request." So they are
50 not saying that children end up feeling negatively towards
51 their parents, but it does suggest a larger number of
52 conflict situations. I suggest that it was some of those
53 conflict situations that mothers seek to avoid by not
54 taking their children shopping with them. At the beginning
55 of the next paragraph: "There is evidence, however, that
56 the child experiences greater personal unhappiness when
57 he/she has seen a TV ad for the product in question and is
58 denied it." This may in part relate to what I was talking
59 about earlier on about peer group pressure; if the child
60 feels it is denied something that his friends or her
