Impacts of social media advertising on primary education students' buying behavior: A study within Iskenderun county

In this study, the effect of social media, which is the most effective communication tool for children, especially children who go to secondary school, on consumer behavior of social media advertisements is examined. The main subject is the visibility of advertisements and promotions placed on social media by companies to sell products to children, and how these affect children's purchasing behavior. This topic has been the core of the research. To base and deepen the research, many domestic and foreign sources have been scanned. Articles, magazines, websites, and news form the basis of these resources. In order to support the historical data to be obtained from here, the questionnaire created sees the purpose of data collection. This survey includes a consumer-style inventory, a social media attitude, behavior and purchase intention survey, and demographic information. The universe of the research includes students who go to secondary school in the Iskenderun district of Hatay province. A total of 300 students were aimed to be interviewed in two secondary schools, one of which is a state and a private school. However, since some of them could not come to school due to illness and some of them did not provide sufficient answers to the questions, 180 of the 300 questionnaires were completely answered and evaluated. The data obtained from the study were analyzed through SPSS 20.0 package program. In the analysis of data, various descriptive statistics such as frequency distributions, mean, variance distribution, standard deviation, as well as reliability analyzes were performed. In addition, Mann Whitney U and Kruskal Wallis-H statistical tests were also applied. Consumer Decision Making Styles Scale (Sproles & Kendall, 1986), Attitude towards Advertising Scale (Pollay & Mittal, 1993; Wang & Sun, 2010; Mir, 2012), Purchasing Intent Pateli, 2013) and Behavior Scale (Wolin, Korgaonkar, & Lund, 2002). The findings about the students' buying styles seem to vary depending on the attitude, behavior, purchase intention, gender, daily allowance, time spent on the internet, frequency of daily visits to social networking sites, time spent on social networking sites, and most frequently visited social networking sites. based on differences. When the findings have been examined, the most striking points were: There is a statistically significant difference according to the purchasing decision style and the gender variables. However, it has been determined that consumer purchasing styles do not show a statistically significant difference according to the daily allowance variables. Therefore, a Post Hoc Test was applied to find out where the differences occurred between the groups. In other findings, it was concluded that attitudes, behaviors, and purchase intentions towards social media advertisements did not differ significantly according to gender and daily allowance variables. Key Words: Purchasing styles, attitudes towards social media advertisements, behavior and purchase intention, Consumer Decision-Making Styles Scale, Attitude Towards Advertising scale, Purchase Intention Scale, Behavior Scale.