Sustainable Finance: Knowledge, Skills and Attitudes That Can Make a Difference

Abstract

Many studies investigate the benefits of financial education with different areas of behavior, however, studies involving financial education and sustainability are still very scarce. This study focuses on proposing the items of the dimensions proposed by Couto, Maracajá and Machado (2022). This research has a qualitative character and an exploratory and descriptive nature, and the type of instrument proposed was a questionnaire containing items that underwent face and content validation by eleven specialists, five from the area of financial education and six from sustainability, through two rounds. The proposed instrument had 139 items distributed in 7 dimensions: financial education (FE), sustainability (S), personal and household budget (B), credit and indebtedness (CI), savings and investment (SI), consumption and waste (CW), and future and legacy (FL). After validation, a total of 137 items were maintained in the dimensions. This study advances in the proposed scope of the dimensions and forcefully includes the environmental pillar in the interaction between financial education and the tripod of sustainability. With structures, contents, and psychometric attributes validated by experts, it is recommended to apply the instrument in cross-sectional studies and longitudinal experiments; the items can also serve as a guide for interview scripts and case studies. The limitation of this study was its strictly theoretical concentration; however, because it is an emerging interdisciplinary relationship, the process of conceptual survey and formulation of relational hypotheses and instrumentation become valuable to minimize risks of theoretical inconsistency and problems in future applications.