The relationship of youth financial literacy with family communication patterns

Abstract

Improving the levels of financial literacy has been a strong topic on the agenda of governments, financial institutions, and schools. In an attempt to increase such levels, the focus has been on education, however research on this topic has provided mixed results, indicating that other relevant factors that may impact financial literacy need further exploration. This dissertation aims to study the relationship of family communication patterns with youth financial literacy as a means to understand if parental communication can be intervened to influence better financial decision-making. I hypothesize that conversation orientation will have a positive impact on the financial literacy test and that conformity orientation will have a negative impact. Additionally, I propose that children from the high conversation and low conformity orientations will be the best performing while low conversation and high conformity orientations will be the lower performers. The research was conducted in partnership with two schools where a survey was deployed among 9th-grade students. Results show that children from families with higher levels of conversation or conformity had higher performance on the financial literacy test, when including an interaction term of conversation and conformity in the analysis. Regarding the interaction of the two dimensions, the only significant difference was that children with high levels of conversation and low conformity (i.e., pluralistic families) outperformed those at low levels of conversation and high conformity (i.e., laissez-faire). This dissertation concludes that both conversation and conformity orientation positively relate to financial literacy and the interaction of these variables is still inconclusive.

Date of Award	30 Jun 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Cristina Mendonça (Supervisor)