SELF-CONTROL MEASURES AND CONSUMER SPENDING IN UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

Abstract

Consumer debts and financial difficulties have affected many university students, with poor self-control in spending identified as a key cause. Although self-control has shown to comprise multiple components which are best assessed with different measures, many studies only examined a small set of these components. There has also been a dominant focus on the Western context in past literature. This thesis therefore sets out to explore a broader conceptualization of consumer self-control in university students from Singapore, an Eastern society, by assessing the relationship between multiple components of self-control in relation to spending behaviour. Three groups of measures are identified for this study, and they include 1) domain-general self-report questionnaires, 2) domain-specific self-report questionnaires as well as 3) effortful inhibition tasks. Domain-general self-report questionnaires emerged as useful predictors of spending behaviour, despite concerns about social desirability bias and lack of domain specificity. Consistent with predictions, they are also significantly associated with each other and the domain-specific questionnaires. For effortful inhibition tasks, higher Flanker task accuracy was unexpectedly found to correlate with higher propensity to consume in terms of spending behaviour. The relationships observed between the different measures and spending behaviour were interpreted through the multiple conceptualizations of trait self-control.