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.
