Socio-cultural factors influencing youth consumption behaviours: The case study at Sakarya University and Kyrgyzstan-Turkey Manas University

While the modern leaves its place to the post-modern, consumption, which has new semantic dimensions such as becoming indicators of identity, status and life style, have become a sine qua non for social and cultural analysis. In this context, consumer culture, beyond the use of consumer products and services, is becoming increasingly a crucial issue as a form of identification of social status and identity. Consumer culture, giving meaning to social relations of production values, removed from the context of interpersonal relationships and relationships with people from objects, refers to the concept of social relations within the framework of consumer relations. The culture, popularized by industry, is taken into consideration by young people and it is considered as a means of defining their life styles.This study is about the gaining importance of consumption in contemporary social analysis and in relation to consumer culture and behaviours. Within the framework of this thesis, particularly sociology, marketing, communication, and interdisciplinary fields of cultural studies by making use of a scale, socio-cultural variables that affect consumption and consumption have been studied. In this study, psychological, social, cultural, structural and economic categories assessed to what extent these variables affect the practices of especially university students? consumption and their response have been sought. When these variables are taken into consideration, in today?s societies, the basic starting point of consumption is the need of young people?s understanding of their lives as well as our understanding of their lives and it contains a functional enrichment.The main purpose of this study is the sociological aspects of consumer behaviours on university youth to examine the context of world consumption and to understand and to explain the consumption experiences of young people in college in terms of socio-cultural parameters. On the one hand the study is based on the study of primary sources and the research of secondary sources and the quantitative and comparative field research conducted in Turkey and Kyrgyzstan (survey). On the other hand, the researcher shares his own experiences and observations on his study as he lectured at the university in Kyrgyzstan and lectures at the university in Turkey.According to research results, it has been observed that the affinities get ahead of the differences in terms of the factors affecting consumption behaviours between Turkish and Kyrgyz adolescents who are university students. This result is a function of both the partnership in the cultural values denominator of the two communities; and the influences that global processes simulate the consumption behaviours of the adolescents. In this context, upon the consumption tendencies of the adolescents, local cultural formation transformative effect of the global consumer culture has been approved by the adolescents themselves. Moreover, life style, culture and family factors have particularly become prominent among the socio-cultural factors affecting the consumption behaviours of the adolescents participated in the investigation. In terms of gender, while female adolescents are receptive to the effects of psycho-social factors, male adolescents are much more receptive to the effects of socio-cultural factors. Consequently, the adolescents who are university students in both Turkey and Kyrgyzstan, seesaw between popular, individual, materialist and hedonist cultural values conditioning them to consume more and more; and local, solidarist and conventional cultural values confining the consumption in terms of preference, attitude, behaviour and tendencies. However, it might be said that in spite of different densities, the individual experiences of the adolescents have included a dialectical synthesis of these two contrasting effects.