Explaining the link between materialism and life satisfaction: A life course study in Turkey

The relationship between materialism and life satisfaction has been widely researched, but the direction of the presumed causality is a subject of debate. Most previous studies suggest that materialism makes people unhappy, other research suggests that unhappiness may promote materialism, while some researchers suggest that they emerged relationship may be the result of third variables. Such speculations remain largely unanswered in part because previous studies have ignored the mechanisms that explain the development of these orientations. The present study uses the life course approach to explain the mechanisms that may lead to the observed relationship between materialism and life satisfaction in Turkey. Despite its cross-sectional nature, the study findings suggest that the emerged relationships between the two variables reported in previous studies may develop relatively independent of each other; and they may explain the inconsistent findings about the nature of the relationship between the two variables. The findings raise the issue of whether the two variables are causally related or whether they are causally related as strongly as it was originally thought.