• Asian Journal for Public Opinion Research
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.226-250
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• 2019

The purpose of this study is to explore whether the perceptions of materialistic realities of South Korean university students can be explained by individual experience and media use. We examined: 1) relative consequences of awareness of discrimination experience and amounts of time spent on genre-specific media on perceptions of materialistic realities, 2) whether cultural orientation (allocentrism, self-monitoring, and masculinity) influences explanatory factors of awareness of discrimination experience, 3) conditions of countervailing responses to materialistic reality. As a result of analyzing the online survey data of 330 university students in Seoul, the amount of time spent on the beauty or fashion genre and awareness of discrimination experience explained the perceptions of materialist reality in Korean society. Although the perceptions that affected the accommodative response did not affect countervailing response, innovativeness had an interaction effect with perceptions of materialist reality in only countervailing response. Finally, the implications of these findings were discussed.