How to Enhance the Effectiveness of Anti-Smoking Messages in Curtailing Teen Smoking: The Role of Parenting Strategies
Zhiyong's research centers on family consumption behavior and cultural psychology. In the field of family consumption behavior, he focuses on how parenting strategies affect child and adolescent smoking. Conventional wisdom suggests that parents have little influence on children's behavior after they enter adolescence. Contradictory to this conclusion, he proposes a Parent-Self-Peer Model, which shows that parenting strategies (e.g., warmth, acceptance, threats, and guilt induction) that children received in childhood affect their consumption-related patterns in the future, through influencing their self-concept trajectory, emotional quotient, and susceptibility to peer influences. This pattern, however, is contingent upon socio-cultural contexts. This model, in its various forms, has been tested by his colleagues and him in a variety of consumption contexts, including child smoking, drinking, music piracy, impulsive buying, decision styles, purchase influence at home, and future financial discipline.