Research Design
Methods
A mixed methods longitudinal survey design was employed, which combined a repeated questionnaire survey with in-depth qualitative interviews with students in clusters of case study institutions (schools and further education colleges1). The study tracked 3 cohorts of students over a period of three years (beginning in October 2005) as they studied the ifs course(s) in financial studies and progressed beyond. Over the course of the study, we conducted individual and focus group interviews with students at 47 different institutions across the United Kingdom. In total, we received 4201 completed survey questionnaires (excluding pilot year). Case studies were conducted with 4 institutions, which allowed us a chance to expand our interviews. We interviewed 44 of the teachers and department heads responsible for the ifs courses at 22 of the institutions we visited.
We employed a socio-cultural framework for this study in order to examine the relation between students' personal financial management, aspirations and the pedagogic culture of financial literacy education. This framework informed our approach to data collection and analysis. Specifically, through interviews and survey questionnaires, we asked students about:
- their past and current personal management practices
- future career aspirations and financial plans
- reflections on their learning on the ifs course.
Analysis
Socio-cultural perspectives on learning (Lave, 1988, Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner & Cain, 1998) provided for a focus to our analysis of the student interviews in terms of identity. We examined 'personal financial management identity' across the interviews and over time in terms of the ways students:
- reported participating in personal financial management
- described their lifetime aspirations in relation to their financial literacy.
We propose that an analysis of the ways that students talked about their financial practices provides insight into their current practices as well as their trajectories for engagement in future personal financial practices. That is, discourse analysis (Gee, 1999) opens up the analysis of interviews to consider students' financial identities or identity 'performances'. Employing methods of discourse analysis (Gee, 1999) we examined the ways students:
- used discourse to construct these personal financial management identities
- drew on discourses of finance offered by the course as well as their family and wider socio-economic contexts in particular.
One of the tools for analysis proposed in Gee's (1999) methods of discourse analysis is the notion of 'cultural models'.
Cultural models are the everyday theories (i.e. storylines, images, schemas, metaphors and models) that people use to make sense of their lives (Gee, 19992).
A key assumption of this work is that financial practices are mediated by students' cultural models of personal financial management. Through our analysis of interviews, we have identified a number of cultural models with regards to personal finance and are developing theoretical generalizations informed by Bandura's theory of self-efficacy.
Perceived self-efficacy refers to a person's confidence in their ability to organise and take action to solve problems or carry out related tasks (Bandura, 19773).
Perceived self-efficacy is a concept used in our analysis, as an indicator of the transition from the ifs course to other, out of school contexts. Self-efficacy theory suggests that knowledge alone is not necessarily enough to inspire action. In the case of financial literacy, this suggests that people require more than knowledge to solve finance-related problems and to 'translate' knowledge into 'more effective consumer behaviours' (Tennyson & Nguyen, 20014).
To examine the ways students' identities, practices and knowledge of personal finance shifted over time, we conducted longitudinal analyses, drawing on:
- interviews with 20 students who participated in interviews all three years
- survey analysis from cohort two, which tracks over 100 students over three years
- survey analysis from cohort one which, reviewed student responses to the questionnaire 22 months after they took the course. (NB: Cohort one is not used for longitudinal analysis because the first survey was a pilot.)
Shifts in knowledge and practices are supported by both interview and survey analysis. See Contributions to Research and Education and Publications for more information on our analysis.
1 i.e. local colleges attended before possible transference to university/higher (degree level) education
2Gee, J. P. (1999) An introduction to discourse analysis: theory and method. London: Routledge.
3Bandura, A. (1977). Self-Efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behaviour change. Psychological Review, 84 191-215.
4Tennyson, S. & Nguyen, C. (2001). State curriculum mandates and student knowledge of personal finance. The Journal of Consumer Affairs, 35 (2), 241-262.