Food Advertising Targeted At Children: Examining the Effects of Parent’s Personal Moral Philosophy, Parenting Style, and Gender

The purpose of this study is to understand and empirically test the role of parents in the advertising and children interaction. Specifically, the study intends to examine the mediating role of parenting style between the personal moral philosophies of parents and attitude toward food advertising (AA) targeted at children and investigate the role of gender of parents in this mediation context. The data were collected from parents who have three to eight year-old children via face-to-face questionnaire. A moderated mediation framework was used to test the proposed relationships. Results indicate that more idealist parents tend to have more socio-oriented parenting style and have more negative attitude toward food advertising targeted at children than relativist and concept-oriented parents. Gender of parents moderates the relation between moral philosophies of the parents and AA via parenting style. This study contributes to the limited existing literature by examining the simultaneous effect of personal moral philosophy of parents and their parenting style on their attitudes toward advertising targeted at children. Morover, most of the existing research focuses on only mother-child interaction. The second contribution of this research is to study the buffering effect of parent’s gender on the proposed relations