The Effects of the Social of Materialistic Value Orientation on Satisfaction with Life among High School Students

In this study we used a sample of 395 high-school students to test hypotheses on the relationship between social status, type of high school attended, materialistic value orientation and satisfaction with life. The results show that students at gymnasiums (general academic high schools) come from families with higher status and that students at middle vocational educational centres (schools) come from the families with the lowest social status. They also showed that the students at middle vocational educational centres were the most materialistic and the gymnasium students the least. The more materialistic the students were, the less they were satisfied with lives. When the indi-cators of social status, type of school attended and materialism of students were inserted into a regressive equation, materialistic value orientation emerged as the only significant predictor of satisfaction with life. In the discussion we put forward a mode; according to which social status primarily influences choice of type of high school, the type of school attended then influences the materialistic value orientation of students and the materialist orientation of students influences their satisfaction with life.