From For You to the family table: Adolescent consumer learning and reverse socialization on TikTok

Abstract

This study examines how TikTok functions as an agent of consumer socialization and facilitates intergenerational knowledge exchange within families. Drawing on 20 in-depth interviews with adolescents aged 11–16, the study investigates how they acquire, interpret, and transmit consumer knowledge via TikTok’s platform design, focusing on what they learn, how they learn, from whom, why they engage, and how they pass this knowledge on to their parents. The findings reveal three key insights. First, TikTok serves as a dynamic site of consumer learning, where adolescents develop transactional knowledge, advertising literacy, and consumption motives through peer-generated content. Second, TikTok’s algorithmic and interactive features allow adolescents to verify and negotiate the credibility of information through peer feedback and participatory practices. Third, adolescents function as informal educators within their families, transferring platform-based expertise through spontaneous and deliberate exchanges. These insights advance consumer socialization theory by reframing adolescents as situated experts whose digital literacies shape intergenerational learning in the platform age.