Financial well-being and subjective/psychological well-being among youth: How uncertainty and ambiguity tolerance affects their relationship Angela Sorgente (
[email protected]), Paola Iannello, Martina Masolini, Margherita Lanz, & Alessandro Antonietti Department of Psychology – Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy
METHOD
INTRODUCTION •
The financial well-being is a positive and good financial condition. Its subjective side consists in the perception and (cognitive and emotional) evaluation of the own financial condition (Sorgente & Lanz, 2017)
PARTICIPANTS Data were collected from 421 Italian (71.4%) and Portuguese (28.6%) emerging adults. They were mainly female (67.6%) and were 24.01 years old on average (SD=1.79; range= 20-27).
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Different studies have found that the subjective financial well-being of emerging adults (i.e., youth aged 18-29) is a significant predictor of their psychological and subjective well-being (e.g., Shim et al., 2009)
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Both uncertainty (a reaction of doubt, confusion etc.) and ambiguity (anything that can be interpreted in more than one way) tolerance has been demonstrated to affect well-being (Bardi et al., 2009) and the level of perceived stress (Iannello et al., 2017)
INSTRUMENTS • Subjective Financial Well-being was measured by 5 factors (general, financial future, money management, having money, peer comparison) using the 25-item Subjective Financial Well-being Scale (Sorgente, 2017) • Subjective Well-being was measured by 3 factors (Life Satisfaction, Positive Feelings, Negative Feelings) using the 9-item Subjective Well-being Subscale (Su, Tay, & Diener, 2014) • Psychological Well-being was measured by one factor using the 8-item Flourishing Scale (Diener et al., 2010) • Uncertainty tolerance was measured by two factors (prospective anxiety, inhibitory anxiety) using the 12-item Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale (Carleton, Norton, & Asmundson, 2007) • Ambiguity tolerance was measured by three factors (discomfort with ambiguity, moral absolutism, need for novelty complexity) using the 21-item Multidimensional Attitude towards Ambiguity Scale (Lauriola, Foschi, Mosca, & Weller, 2015)
IS THIS RELATIONSHIP MODERATED BY UNCERTAINTY AND AMBIGUITY TOLERANCE?
DATA ANALYSIS & RESULTS
STEP 1: CLUSTER ANALYSIS TO OBTAIN COGNITIVE PROFILES ANALYSIS STEPS: 1. Trasforming the variables scores (prospective anxiety, inhibitory anxiety, discomfort with ambiguity, moral absolutism, need for novelty complexity) in z-scores 2. Removing outliers (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2013) 3. Two-step procedure of cluster analysis (Gore, 2000): a) hierarchical cluster analysis using Ward's method on squared Euclidean distance b) The initial cluster centers of the selected cluster solution were used as non-random starting points in an iterative k-means clustering method.
RESULTS: • The “need for novelty complexity” dimension was removed from the cluster analysis as it was not useful to discriminate among different clusters. • The best cluster solution identified four clusters: (1) Anxiety (all scores higher than the sample average) (2) No-anxiety (all scores lower than the sample average) (3) Absolutism (all average scores, expect for “moral absolutism” that is higher than the sample average) (4) No-absolutism (all average scores, expect for “moral absolutism” that is lower than the sample average)
STEP 3: RUNNING THE MODEL ON THE WHOLE SAMPLE
STEP 2: TESTING MEASUREMENT INVARIANCE ARE THE THREE MEASURES OF WELL-BEING INVARIANT ACROSS THE FOUR COGNTIVE PROFILES? 1. Subjective Financial Well-being Scale. Uniqueness Invariance: χ2 (1285)= 1969.12; P
