Materialistic tendency, gratitude and religious-spiritual life relationship in adolescents

In this study, gratitude, materialistic tendency and religiousness levels in adolescents and the relationship between them were examined. The population of the study consists of high school students in Avcılar, Fatih and Üsküdar districts of Istanbul in 2018-2019 academic year. The sample group consisted of eight schools; four Anatolian high schools, two vocational high schools and in total 525 high school students, 287 of whom were girls and 238 boys of these three districts. This study has been conducted by these scales: The Islamic religiosity scale made by Uysal in 1995 and revised by Ayten, The Continious Gratitude Scale which was developed by McCullough, Emmons, Tsang in 2002 and translated into Turkish by Göcen for validity and reliability analysis, materialism scale developed by Richins and Dawson in 1992 and adapted by Turan into Turkish and short and personal form of appreciation scale developed by Adler and Fagley in 2005 and adapted by Göcen into Turkish. For our original study, the data were collected in the period between December 2018 –February 2019. The data obtained were analyzed with Pearson Correlation, One Way Anova and independent group t-test methods with the help of SPSS 22 program. According to the results of the analysis, materialistic tendency and gratitude were found to be negatively, religiousness and gratitude were found to be positively correlated in adolescents. Furthermore, religiosity and materialist tendency was found to be negatively correlated. On the other hand, these dependent variables and their sub-dimensions were found to differ significantly according to demographic variables.