Study title

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.In the spring of 2011, the BBC Lab UK used the flagship consumer affairs programme Watchdog to launch an online survey, across the nation, of emotional and psychological relationships with money: the Big Money Test. Public response to the survey was good and over the following months more than 109,000 people completed the survey. The survey was designed by Mark Fenton-O’Creevy (Open University) and Adrian Furnham (University College London) to develop ways of characterising people’s psychological and emotional relationships with money and examine how they affect financial health. A good deal of public money and resources are devoted to providing people with the knowledge they need to manage their financial affairs. Regulatory regimes require providers of financial services to provide their customers with specific forms of financial knowledge. However, for the most part, these kinds of knowledge-based strategies have had limited success in improving how capable people are at managing their money. This study was founded in a concern that knowledge-focused approaches to financial behaviour miss a very important part of the picture, the emotional and attitudinal elements of our relationship to money. The researchers wanted to question whether it is lack of financial knowledge that most often makes the difference in successfully navigating financial difficulties or our habits, attitudes, beliefs and emotions about money. They wanted to look at whether there are useful ways in which we can characterise a person’s ‘financial personality’ and whether how people manage their emotions matters to their financial behaviour. Participants were told that by participating they would help scientists understand how and why different people think and feel about money in different ways. As an incentive for participation they were offered (automated) video and web feedback on key self-reported financial...