Data for: Scarcity or luxury: Which leads to adolescent greed? Evidence from a large-scale adolescent sample
Description
Because greed is associated with various destructive outcomes, understanding the developmental precursors to dispositional greed in adolescence is of great importance. However, there are few empirical studies on this topic. The current study aimed to examine the relationship between childhood socioeconomic status (CSES) and adolescent greed and the moderating effect of sibling condition. Two competing hypotheses were proposed. One is the scarcity hypothesis, which claims that CSES may be negatively related to adolescent greed. Another is the luxury hypothesis, which proposes that the richer the environment one grew up in, the more likely one is to develop dispositional greed. The study was conducted with a sample comprising 3,444 students from 5 middle schools in Hebei (North China), Shanxi (Northwest China), Hubei (Middle China), Guangxi and Guangdong (South China) provinces. In total, data from 244 participants were eliminated from the final analysis because they failed to pass the validity check. Data from 3,200 participants were entered into the final analysis. Among these participants, 1,712 (53.5%) were females, 1,356 (42.4%) were males, and 132 (4.1%) were unknown. In addition, 1,264 (39.5%) were only children and 1,936 (60.5%) were children with siblings. Participants’ ages ranged from 11 to 19 years old (Mage = 15.19, SD = 1.81, with 18 missing values). The current study provides evidence supporting the luxury hypothesis rather than the scarcity hypothesis. In addition, the results of the current study also confirmed the moderating role of sibling condition. Specifically, the dispositional greed of adolescents increases with an increase in CSES when there is only one child in the family, while this is not the case for children with siblings.