Assessment of Materialistic Value Orientation of Undergraduate Social Studies Students of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria-Nigeria

Abstract

The study assessed the materialistic value orientation of undergraduate Social Studies students of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria-Nigeria. Specifically, it was aimed at determining the materialistic value orientation of undergraduate Social Studies students in relation to gender and study level. The design of the study was survey. The population of the study consists of all undergraduate Social Studies students of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria as at 2016/2017 session numbering 1030. The sample size used for the study was 280 undergraduate Social Studies students based on the Research Advisors (2006) table for sample size selection. Three sampling techniques were used at different stages; purposive, proportional stratified and stratified simple random sampling techniques. The study adopted Trinh and Phau (2012) materialism scale developed based on the theoretical foundation of Richins and Dawson (1992) to measure four components of materialism, namely material success, material happiness, material essentiality and material distinctiveness. The arithmetic mean and standard deviation were used to answer the questions raised while independent samples t-test was used to validate the null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The study findings showed that both male and female undergraduate Social Studies students had the tendency to be  materialistic in their value orientation and that 400 level Social Studies students were prone to materialistic value orientation than the 300 level students. Some recommendations based on the findings are put forth.