Towards a Positive Attitude to Money: Designing an Intervention to Enhance Wellbeing and Reduce Anxiety, with Cross-Cultural Testing

Money and money-related problems are an omnipotent topic in daily life but there is paucity in the existing knowledge about how to tackle these issues. Similarly, there is a big research gap in our understanding about money attitudes in India as, most of the research conducted in this topic is mainly focused on the Western world countries like the UK (Brown, Henchoz, & Spycher, 2018).
The purpose of this research was to deepen our understanding of different perspectives about money by including both Indian and British views. Furthermore, the aim was to create a remedial positive psychology intervention which will help to improve well-being and to reduce anxiety about money and test it’s the efficacy of the PPI across two cultures (India and the UK).
This research unfolds in three different studies; The first study was a systematic review about various money attitudes and their impact on various life outcomes, the second study investigates if participants from India and the UK share similar or different views about money. Furthermore, this study aimed to find out the coping strategies used by participants to deal with money-related stress and anxiety. The next chapter was a pilot creating an intervention to enhance well-being and reduce anxiety related to money. The third study was to test the effectiveness of this money intervention in an Indian versus British culture.
The overall findings from this research suggest that every individual has a unique attitude towards money. Furthermore, every individual deal with money-related issues in a distinct fashion. The money related views and issues are complex and demand nuanced understanding to deal with them.
The findings have implications for people dealing with anxiety related to money, ways of dealing with money-related issues and understanding cross-cultural perspectives around money. Thus, this research advances the overall knowledge in the psychology of money.