Understanding the Intention of Chinese Parents to Enroll Their Children in Early Enrichment Programs – A Social Media Perspective

Early learning centers are springing up rapidly in China. However, parents are confronted with high prices and difficulty in assessing the effectiveness of early enrichment programs (EEPs). This study was driven by this phenomenon and aimed to investigate parental decision-making processes of buying EEPs from a social media perspective. We sampled 271 Chinese parents and analyzed data by partial least squares based structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The results show that social media use intensity positively predicted injunctive norms and descriptive norms. The mediating analysis confirms that injunctive norms and descriptive norms are internalized into parental attitude to EEPs with varying degrees. This evidence serves as a new interpretation of the contrasting effect sizes of injunctive norms vs. descriptive norms on parental intention. The data however does not confirm that better-educated parents are less influenced by social norms in EEPs decision-making. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed in the paper.