Preliminary results on the assessment of attitudes toward saving in unstable economies: importance of contextual and socioeconomic factors
Abstract
Psychology has gained ground in study of consumption, saving, and borrowing behavior with its contributions on the individual characteristics that underlie these behavioral patterns. Attitudes towards saving as a specific psychological trait represent an important variable related to economic behavior, however its assessment has ingrained certain limitations, especially in countries with unstable economies. The purpose of this study was to explore the existence of contextual and socioeconomic factors as dimensions of the construct attitudes by introducing the preliminary results of the development of an Argentinian measure of attitudes towards saving. The design and development of the scale consisted of several phases: establishing a general assessment framework, consultation with experts, defining attitudes towards saving, creating an item pool, conducting individual interviews and a focus group with object population, pilot studies, and preliminary psychometric analyses. A series of exploratory factor analyses identified four dimensions that constituted a total of 20 items that explained 61.45% of the total variance with adequate values of internal consistency for each subscale. The dimensions retained revealed that items on contextual and socioeconomic factors were relevant in defining attitudes towards saving in local population. These findings could be useful to governments in the designing of financial public policies.
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