Psychometric evaluation of the Financial Threat Scale (FTS) in the context of the great recession

Evaluation of the Financial Threat Scale (FTS) in four European, non-student samples

“…The purpose of this investigation was to replicate and extend upon the findings of Marjanovic et al (2013). Our threefold plan was to: (1) evaluate the FTS' psychometric properties across a more diverse set of community samples; (2) examine the FTS' relations with additional situational, personality, and psychological health measures; and (3) test the mediation hypothesis that heightened financial threat comes between situational deterioration and diminished mental health.…”

“…First among these, we aimed to replicate our findings in more mature and diverse, non-student samples. For these reasons, we chose to Table 1 Variables of interest studied in Marjanovic et al (2013) evaluate the FTS using community samples of two European countries that fared well during the economic crisis (Belgium and Germany) and two European countries that fared comparatively poorly (Portugal and Spain) (Economist, 2014;Leschke and Watt, 2010). We speculated that because financial threat seems to be a widely experienced phenomenon, its psychometric qualities and relations with other variables should be similar across disparate samples.…”

“…However, reflecting macroeconomic forces, participant FTS scores should be lower in the countries that fared well in the downturn than those that did poorly. The second part of our plan involved replicating the correlational findings of Marjanovic et al (2013), and further exploring the FTS' nomological network with its relations to additional conceptually important variables (see Table 1 for a list of all variables). Firstly, whereas in the 2013 study we showed that reporting high levels of financial threat was related to suffering recent economic hardships and negative income change, we wished to expand upon these relationships by including another situational variable: job insecurity.…”

“…Marjanovic et al (2013) found, for example, that participants with high levels of trait worry and low self-efficacy were especially vulnerable to experiencing financial threat. In this study we wished to replicate these findings, but also examine the FTS' relation to another ubiquitous personality variable: self-esteem.…”

Coping as a moderator of the influence of economic stressors on psychological health

“…The combination of situations of economic hardship, financial threat, and lack of financial well-being also contributed to the appearance of negative psychological outcomes (Kim, Garman, & Sorhaindo, 2003;Marjanovic et al, 2013;Norvilitis et al, 2003). Well-being can be affected by work-related aspects (Fenge et al, 2012), such as job dissatisfaction and unemployment, two common situations in contexts of economic turmoil, which potentiate depressive symptoms.…”