L IMITATIONS AND F UTURE R ESEARCH

There are some limitations that should be mentioned in the research. The first

limitation is that the designed situations in scenarios could not comprise all situations

in real world. Even though we design the experiment not just a survey, there are still a

lot of interference factors. For example, company may provide some “examples”

product when the children participate, or parents may accompany their child doing the

self-designed activities and so on, which will affect the design process or the

designer’s mood.

The second limitation is time limit. Because we could not affect the students’

class time, we have to limit the entire experimental time within 40 minutes and the

design time within 15 minutes. For children, it may not have sufficient time to

complete the satisfactory work.

Future research is also needed to understand the influences of social comparison

and goal orientation dynamics have on the evaluations of the customized product. In

the experiment, we told the subjects that those whose performance ranked top 30 will

win a reward. Cameron and Pierce’s (1994) conclusion revealed that the offer of a

reward was beneficial when tied to a set of standard. Thus, it may examine the effect

of different types of rewards.

After the experiment, some children told the experimenter that they want to

design their T-shirt again and they believe they will do better next time. It means even

though the evaluation for self-designed T-shirt is low, the confidence of co-design

still exist. There is room for further investigation. It may also examine the influence

on confidence to co-design or the repurchase attention.

Finally, we will discuss the issue from the educational point of view. According

to the figure 3, we found that the difference of evaluation between upward

comparison and downward comparison in learning goal orientation is less than in

extrinsic goal orientation. This means if a child is not good at design, he may

depreciate himself in the case of upward comparison, especially for children who had

extrinsic goal orientation. It will have bad impact on children’s learning and

development. As a result, in the position of education, we don’t encourage external

rewards. Future research should also examine how to raise children’s evaluation for

self-designed product under learning goal orientation.

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