Chinese Migrant Workers’ Adoption of Urban Consumer Habits

The present research conducted semi-structured interviews with over 1,000 Chinese migrant workers to identify factors influencing their adoption of urban consumer habits. Research on habit formation finds the process to be effortful and resource depleting. Likewise, we predicted that migrant workers with greater resources would be more likely to adopt urban consumer habits. Resources were categorized as either internal (biological and cognitive) or external (social and economic) to the consumer. Using a structural equation model, cognitive and economic resources were found to have positive direct effects on habit adoption, while biological and social resources were found to have positive indirect effects on habit adoption, through cognitive and economic resources, respectively