You're using an outdated browser. Please upgrade to a modern browser for the best experience.
Submitted Successfully!
Thank you for your contribution! You can also upload a video entry or images related to this topic. For video creation, please contact our Academic Video Service.
Version Summary Created by Modification Content Size Created at Operation
1
Adrian Furnham
 -- 828 2025-06-06 05:28:53 |
2 formatted
Arao Fu
 Meta information modification 828 2025-06-06 05:34:46 |

Video Upload Options

We provide professional Academic Video Service to translate complex research into visually appealing presentations. Would you like to try it?
No, upload directly Yes

Confirm

Are you sure to Delete?
Yes No
Cite
If you have any further questions, please contact Encyclopedia Editorial Office.
Furnham, A. Measuring Money Attitudes and Beliefs. Encyclopedia. Available online: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/58465 (accessed on 18 June 2025).
Furnham A. Measuring Money Attitudes and Beliefs. Encyclopedia. Available at: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/58465. Accessed June 18, 2025.
Furnham, Adrian. "Measuring Money Attitudes and Beliefs" Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/58465 (accessed June 18, 2025).
Furnham, A. (2025, June 06). Measuring Money Attitudes and Beliefs. In Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/58465
Furnham, Adrian. "Measuring Money Attitudes and Beliefs." Encyclopedia. Web. 06 June, 2025.
Peer Reviewed
Measuring Money Attitudes and Beliefs
This is a peer-reviewed entry published in Encyclopedia Journal, full entry can be found at 10.3390/encyclopedia5020078

Over the last 50 years, there have been many attempts to devise and validate questionnaires to assess an individual’s attitude toward money and related issues. This paper attempts to conduct a comprehensive review of those measures. In all, this paper documents 54 salient studies and consults many other references from diverse and multi-disciplinary literature. There is evidently a great deal of overlap in the money attitudes dimensions assessed. Research has concentrated on the correlates of these attitudes (cultural, demographic, financial, and personality). Suggestions for the choice and development of measures are made, along with propositions for future research.

money attitudes questionnaire saving spending
People undoubtedly differ in their money attitudes, beliefs, and habits, which can have serious consequences for their well-being [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. Over the last 50 years, psychologists have attempted to construct and validate measures of attitudes to, and beliefs about, money [11]. Various research groups are involved in this literature, including economists; clinical, economic, and social psychologists; financial advisors; and sociologists [12][13]. All are interested in how people think about, and use, their money in many different ways [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. Topics of interest have ranged from the relationship of money beliefs to Bitcoin [23], personality and money [24], as well as money as a symbol in the relationship between financial advisors and their clients [25]. Some researchers are interested in parental financial education [26] and others in spending and saving [4][27]. There is now a great deal of interest in financial literacy and how that is influenced by money attitudes [28][29][30][31]. It has been recognized that money attitudes and financial literacy are clearly related to financial well-being, which is the concern of many [32]. Studies have been conducted around the world and the interest in the area is truly universal [33].
This disciplinary divergence in this area makes it particularly difficult to review and keep up to date with the literature. Moreover, it highlights certain disciplinary disparities in values and expertise. Thus, psychologists seem more interested in, and competent at, questionnaire designs and evaluation; financial advisors are more intrigued by changing money beliefs, and sociologists are fascinated by the distribution of these beliefs in society. There are also detectable and different ABC (Affectively, Behavioural, and Cognitively) models and some tension between quantitative and qualitative researchers.
The literature has grown exponentially over this half-century, and there now exist several noteworthy reviews [34][35][36]. Some researchers, like Thomas Tang, have worked in the area for over 30 years, publishing well over one hundred papers and are concerned with ethical and business correlates of monetary beliefs [37][38]. There are also many specific interest areas like gender differences in the use of money, student understanding and use of money, cultural differences in money attitudes, and how best to help people with financial problems [39].
This paper documents over 50 research studies from various countries and disciplines that explore money attitudes, an issue of both practical and theoretical interest. This review will inevitably miss critical papers because of the complexity of the topic, but it serves to partly update the reviews by Furnham [40] and Sesini and Lozza [34][35]. The essential aim of this review is to assist researchers in their choice of instruments to assess money beliefs. Furthermore, it indicates what individual difference factors have been investigated with respect to the various measures, to what extent results (e.g., sex differences) have been replicated, and, therefore, what remains to be explored. It should be stressed that this paper is not an attempt to provide a comprehensive review of the many and growing studies on attitudes to money; rather, the aim is to examine the different questionnaires that have been designed to assess those attitudes.
There are many questionnaires, probably now over 20, which attempt to assess money-related attitudes and behaviours [6][9][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50]. These are being developed all the time, often for very specific purposes [51]. Many have been critically appraised [52][53][54].
When researchers select an instrument to measure money attitudes and beliefs, they nearly always have similar specific criteria: they want it to be comprehensive to the extent that it measures all known and salient dimensions; they want it to be as short as possible (to encourage participant retention); and, most of all, they want it to be reliable (internally, and test–retest) as well as valid (concurrent, construct, convergent, discriminant, face, incremental, and predictive). Ideally, they would also like it to be cross-culturally valid, prone to little impression management, and appropriate for a wide variety of people in terms of demography. These criteria are a “tall order” for non-experts attempting to construct a useful measure of a construct they understand. This paper is not a psychometric review, though there is clearly a need for one to help researchers make choices about which measure to use.
This paper will first document the relevant papers in a table and compare the approaches and findings. Then the issue of dimensions will be discussed, which is often concerned with the theory or model underlying monetary attitudes and beliefs. The final section of the paper will discuss some important research questions in this area and what important future research needs to be conducted.

References

  1. Astriti, N.-E.; Prodromitis, G. Death Anxiety Among Urban Middle Class: The Predictive Role of Income and Symbolic Money Attitudes. J. Humanist. Psychol. 2024.
  2. Chen, Y.; Lee, V.; Tang, T.L. Does thinking about making money help people save money? Behavioral economics—Monetary wisdom across genders: Ardent love of money aspirations and $1 million resource allocation. Asian J. Bus. Ethics 2024, 13, 323–365.
  3. Furnham, A. The personality disorders and money beliefs and behaviors. Financ. Plan. Rev. 2020, 2, e1046.
  4. Kelley, H.H.; Chandler, A.B.; LeBaron-Black, A.B.; Li, X.; Curran, M.A.; Yorgason, J.B.; James, S. Spenders and Tightwads Among Newlyweds: Perceptions of Partner Financial Behaviors and Relational Well-Being. J. Financ. Ther. 2022, 13, 3.
  5. Kim, M.J.; Huang, Y.; Chen, H. A penny saved is a penny earned: How money-view and self-view jointly influence consumer financial behaviour. Int. J. Consum. Stud. 2022, 46, 449–458.
  6. Klontz, B.; Britt, S.L.; Mentzer, J.; Klontz, T. Money beliefs and financial behaviors: Development of the Klontz Money Script Inventory. J. Financ. Ther. 2011, 2, 1.
  7. Klontz, B.; Britt, S.L.; Archuleta, K.; Klontz, P.T. Disordered Money Behaviors: Development of the Klontz Money Behavior Inventory. J. Financ. Ther. 2012, 3, 2.
  8. Klontz, B.T.; Seay, M.C.; Sullivan, P.; Canale, A. The psychology of wealth: Psychological factors associated with high income. J. Financ. Plan. 2014, 27, 46–53.
  9. Lay, A.; Furnham, A. A New Money Attitudes Questionnaire. Eur. J. Psychol. Assess. 2019, 35, 813–822.
  10. Zabelina, E.; Kurnosova, S.; Shchukina, K. Attitude to Money as a Factor of Life Satisfaction of the Northern Indigenous Peoples. In Management, Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Challenging Global Times. Lecture Notes in Management and Industrial Engineering; Prostean, G.I., Lavios, J.J., Brancu, L., Şahin, F., Eds.; Springer: Cham, Switzerland, 2024.
  11. Wernimont, P.F.; Fitzpatrick, S. The meaning of money. J. Appl. Psychol. 1972, 56, 218–226.
  12. Kraemer, K.; Jakelja, L.; Brugger, F.; Nessel, S. The social ambiguity of money: Empirical evidence on the multiple usability of money in social life. Rev. Soc. Econ. 2024, 82, 98–125.
  13. Lynn, R. The Secret of the Miracle Economy: Different National Attitudes to Competitiveness and Money; Social Affairs Unit: London, UK, 1991.
  14. Bailey, W.; Gustafson, W. An examination of the relationship between personality factors and attitudes to money. In Handbook of Behavioural Economics; Frantz, R., Singh, H., Gerber, J., Eds.; JAI Press: Stamford, CT, USA, 1991; pp. 271–285.
  15. Christopher, A.N.; Marek, P.; Carroll, S.M. Materialism and Attitudes toward Money: An Exploratory Investigation. Individ. Differ. Res. 2004, 2, 109–117.
  16. de Almeida, F.; Ferreira, M.B.; Soro, J.C.; Silva, C.S. Attitudes Toward Money and Control Strategies of Financial Behavior: A Comparison Between Overindebted and Non-overindebted Consumers. Front. Psychol. 2021, 12, 566594.
  17. Furnham, A. Attitudinal correlates and demographic predictors of monetary beliefs and behaviours. J. Organ. Behav. 1996, 17, 375–388.
  18. Furnham, A.; Cuppello, S.; Fenton-O’Creevy, M. Correlates of Stock Market Investment. J. Neurosci. Psychol. Econ. 2024, 17, 80–87.
  19. Gasiorowska, A.; Zaleskiewicz, T. The psychology of money. In Handbook of Research Methods in Behavioural Economics; Altman, M., Ed.; Edward Elgar Publishing: Northampton, MA, USA, 2023; Chapter 12; pp. 209–225.
  20. Harnish, R.J.; Bridges, K.R.; Nataraajan, R.; Gump, J.T.; Carson, A.E. The impact of money attitudes and global life satisfaction on the maladaptive pursuit of consumption. Psychol. Mark. 2018, 35, 189–196.
  21. Ngcamu, L.J.; Quaye, E.S.; Horvey, S.S.; Jaravaza, D.C. Personality traits, money attitudes and consumer decision-making styles as predictors of investment products choice in South Africa. J. Consum. Behav. 2023, 22, 618–631.
  22. Tatarko, A.; Schmidt, P. Social capital and attitudes towards money. Soc. Sci. Res. Netw. 2012.
  23. Kim, M. A Psychological Approach to Bitcoin Usage Behavior in the Era of COVID-19: Focusing on the Role of Attitudes toward Money. J. Retail. Consum. Serv. 2021, 62, 102606.
  24. McCann, S.J.H. Personality and Money Matters: The Relation of State Resident Neuroticism to Common State-Level Financial and Economic Indicators. Curr. Psychol. 2023, 43, 3307–3327.
  25. Lozza, E.; Castiglioni, C.; Bonanomi, A.; Poli, F. Money as a symbol in the relationship between financial advisors and their clients: A dyadic study. Int. J. Bank Mark. 2022, 40, 613–630.
  26. LeBaron, A.B.; Holmes, E.K.; Jorgensen, B.L.; Bean, R.A. Parental financial education during childhood and financial behaviors of emerging adults. J. Financ. Couns. Plan. 2020, 31, 42–54.
  27. Kappes, H.B.; Gladstone, J.J.; Hershfield, H.E. Beliefs about whether spending implies wealth. J. Consum. Res. 2021, 48, 1–21.
  28. Liu, T.; Fan, M.; Li, Y.; Yue, P. Financial literacy and household financial resilience. Financ. Res. Lett. 2024, 63, 105378.
  29. Lusardi, A.; Mitchell, O.S. The Importance of Financial Literacy: Opening a New Field. J. Econ. Perspect. 2023, 37, 137–154.
  30. Michiels, A.; Binz Astrachan, C. It’s (not) all about the money: Financial decisions at the intersection of business and family. J. Fam. Bus. Manag. 2025.
  31. Nuwailah, E.J.; Ermawati, W.J. Young Muslims’ Financial Behavior: Money Attitudes and Financial Literacy by Debt Status. Rev. Islam. Account. 2025, 4, 2.
  32. Brüggen, E.C.; Hogreve, J.; Holmlund, M.; Kabadayi, S.; Löfgren, M. Financial well-being: A conceptualization and research agenda. J. Bus. Res. 2017, 79, 228–237.
  33. Neto, J.; Neto, F.; Furnham, A. Correlates of money attitudes among Portuguese people. Financ. Plan. Rev. 2024, 7, e1189.
  34. Sesini, G.; Lozza, E. La rappresentazione sociale del denaro e della crisi economica: Differenze per ciclo di vita . Sist. Intelligenti 2023, 35, 611–631.
  35. Sesini, G.; Lozza, E. Understanding Individual Attitude to Money: A Systematic Scoping Review and Research Agenda. Collabra: Psychol. 2023, 9, 77305.
  36. Sesini, G.; Manzi, C.; Lozza, E. Is psychology of money a gendered affair? A scoping review and research agenda. Int. J. Consum. Stud. 2023, 47, 2701–2723.
  37. Tang, T.L.-P. The meaning of money: Extension and exploration of the money ethic scale in a sample of university students in Taiwan. J. Organ. Behav. 1993, 14, 93–99.
  38. Tang, T.L.-P. Monetary Wisdom: A Measure of Attitude Toward Money—Constructs and Items. In Encyclopedia of Business and Professional Ethics; Poff, D.C., Michalos, A.C., Eds.; Springer: Berlin/Heidelberg, Germany, 2020; pp. 1344–1350.
  39. White, K.J.; McCoy, M.; Watkins, K.; Chen, X.; Koposko, J.L.; Mizuta, M. “We Don’t Talk About That”: Exploring Money Conversations of Black, Hispanic, and White Households. Fam. Consum. Sci. Res. J. 2021, 49, 328–343.
  40. Furnham, A. The New Psychology of Money, 1st ed.; Routledge: London, UK, 2014.
  41. Furnham, A. Many sides of the coin: The psychology of money usage. Pers. Individ. Differ. 1984, 5, 501–509.
  42. Furnham, A.; Wilson, E.; Telford, K. The meaning of money: The validation of a short money-types measure. Pers. Individ. Differ. 2012, 52, 707–711.
  43. Furnham, A.; Grover, S. A new money behaviour quiz. J. Individ. Differ. 2020, 41, 17–29.
  44. Khare, A. Money attitudes, materialism, and compulsiveness: Scale development and validation. J. Glob. Mark. 2014, 27, 30–45.
  45. Lim, V.K.G.; Teo, T.S.H. Sex, money and financial hardship: An empirical study of attitudes towards money among undergraduates in Singapore. J. Econ. Psychol. 1997, 18, 369–386.
  46. Rose, G.M.; Orr, L.M. Measuring and exploring symbolic money meanings. Psychol. Mark. 2007, 24, 743–761.
  47. Tang, T.L.-P. The meaning of money revisited. J. Organ. Behav. 1992, 13, 197–202.
  48. Tang, T.L.-P.; Sutarso, T.; Ansari, M.A.; Lim, V.K.G.; Teo, T.S.H.; Arias-Galicia, F.; Garber, I.E.; Chiu, R.K.-K.; Charles-Pauvers, B.; Luna-Arocas, R.; et al. Monetary intelligence and behavioral economics across 32 cultures: Good apples enjoy good quality of life in good barrels. J. Bus. Ethics 2018, 148, 893–917.
  49. Taylor, C.D.; Klontz, B.T.; Britt, S.L. Internal consistency and convergent validity of the Klontz Money Behavior Inventory (KMBI). J. Financ. Ther. 2016, 6, 3.
  50. Yamauchi, K.T.; Templer, D.J. The development of a money attitude scale. J. Pers. Assess. 1982, 46, 522–528.
  51. Beutler, I.F.; Gudmunson, C. New adolescent money attitude scales: Entitlement and conscientiousness. J. Financ. Couns. Plan. 2012, 23, 18–31.
  52. Baker, P.M.; Hagedorn, R.B. Attitudes to money in a random sample of adults: Factor analysis of the MAS and MBBS scales, and correlations with demographic variables. J. Socio-Econ. 2008, 37, 1803–1814.
  53. Spinella, M.; Lester, D.; Yang, B. Consistency of the Yamauchi/Templer Money Attitude Scale. Psychol. Rep. 2005, 97, 962.
  54. Yang, B.; Lester, D. Internal Consistency of the Yamauchi/Templer Money Attitude Scale. Psychol. Rep. 2002, 91, 994.
More
© Text is available under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy.
Upload a video for this entry
Information
Subjects: Sociology
Contributor MDPI registered users' name will be linked to their SciProfiles pages. To register with us, please refer to https://encyclopedia.pub/register :
Adrian Furnham
View Times: 141
Online Date: 06 Jun 2025
Table of Contents
    1000/1000
    Hot Most Recent
    Academic Video Service
    Feedback