Frequently Asked Questions about the APLUS Project
1) Did you examine the extent to which parents through role modeling or otherwise influence the financial behaviors of their college students?
This is the first research topic we are addressing.
We know that parents socialize their children as consumers, but we have not clearly defined the specific roles that parents play.
One of the first things we looked at was how family factors, as well as students’ experiences prior to college AND during the first year at college, affect their current financial behaviors.
A powerful finding from this study is that parents play a key role in children’s financial well-being, through their own behavior, direct teaching, and role modeling – stronger than students’ experiences prior to or during the first year at college. The effect of a parent’s direct teaching regarding financial matters was twice that produced by high-school direct teaching and twice the effect produced by high-school work experience!
Parents influence not only their children’s financial behaviors, but their financial attitudes and perception of their ability to manage their finances as well.
Thus, programs that help parents’ to be more financially responsible represent an investment in the financial well-being of their children.
2) Why did you assess students’ current financial knowledge from three perspectives: Subjective, Comparative, and Objective?
Typically, a positive sense of self contributes to confidence in our abilities, which in turn contributes to success and well-being. Our interest is in examining this association specific to financial attitudes and positive outcomes (health, well-being, academic achievement, and responsible financial behaviors).
We included all three so that we could assess the contribution of each and examine the relationship among these perspectives.
In other words, is our well-being affected more by thinking we are competent (Subjective), thinking we are more competent than our friends (comparative), or knowing about personal finance (Objective)?
Or does knowing about personal finance (objective) affect our thinking about our financial abilities?
We have just begun to consider these questions.
3) What does/did Comparative perspective really tell us?
Typically, people assess themselves as more competent than their peers. As such, it may indicate a negative self-concept, diminished well-being – or perhaps current financial distress. We can only interpret it in combination with other factors to see how it contributes to our understanding of how financial attitudes and behaviors contribute to dimensions of well-being.
4) How are you going to bridge current Financial Knowledge to future attitudes and behaviors?
Our plan is to collect data from these students throughout their college careers – and into adulthood - to see how current Financial Knowledge predicts future attitudes and behaviors, and to understand how financial knowledge, attitudes and behaviors change over time.
5) Are you looking for changes in attitudes after having financial knowledge from your team?
We are capturing information on students’ exposure to financial education to see what impact formal education has on changes in their attitudes, behaviors etc.
However, having knowledge – and acting on it – may be two different things. That is why we are collecting information on attitudes. Typically, the association between attitude and behavior is stronger than the association between knowledge and behavior. We are also capturing information about students’ life circumstances to examine the role of present life circumstances on actual behaviors.
6) What intervention if any is being delivered to the students and their families during these difficult economic times?
We have submitted a proposal to invite the APLUS students to take an online money management course, but have not received notice about the funding. Assuming we receive funding, we will invite students who are interested to take the online course, providing them with the login information. Of course, their participation is voluntary.
We do not plan to offer interventions to the families – as that is beyond the scope of our research.
7) How do you assess “positive outcomes” of health, well-being that is specifically associated to financial knowledge?
We are interested in the association between financial knowledge, attitudes and behaviors and people’s health/ well-being, specifically the pathway FROM financial knowledge, attitudes and behaviors TO well-being. Simply put, we want to understand the process through which these factors lead to well-being.
As a starting point, we asked students to self-report on several domains of well-being, e.g., physical, psychological, financial, academic, and overall sense of well-being, in addition to collecting information on the factors that might influence the outcomes.
As the next step, we are testing these relationships using a statistical modeling technique (structured equation modeling or SEM). This will tell us which pathways have evidence to support the relationship.
Our next step will be to test to see if financial knowledge actually “causes” well-being. We need longitudinal data (from future waves of data collection) to conduct these analyses.