Exploring the role of personality in students’ credit behaviour

To critically review the pilot provided and design the data collection for a wider study on the role of personality in students’ behaviour. Your proposal for data collection should provide a representative investigation of the Scottish Universities. Specifically, the proposal should outline the following: 1. Method(s) of data collection (i.e. questionnaire/focus groups/in-depth interviews) (20 points). ? 2. The sampling method you plan to use with the sampling frame (where appropriate) and details ?of how this sample will be selected (20 points). ? 3. Method(s) of administration (i.e. postal, face-to-face, telephone, e-mail, etc.) (20 points). ? 4. Critique of the questionnaire (30 points). ? Each of the above should include the justification of your choices/ explanation of the rationale behind the critique. Additional 10 points will be given for presentation, credibility (the extent the project is realistic) and logical cohesion (e.g., the suggested sampling method can be implemented with the proposed method of administration). Answers to points 1-3 should be provided in the report, which should be no longer than 1000 words.The critique of the questionnaire should be no longer than 4 pagesin length. The objective of the coursework is to assess your knowledge of data collection. Whilst you may find the resources provided below useful in getting more information on the context of the topic, the in-depth knowledge of credit risk assessment or psychometrics is not required. There is no need to get into the theory of psychometric measurement. When evaluating the questionnaire, you should not aim at suggesting a better tool to measure the personality, but concentrate on the format/wording of the questions, their order, any aspects that may affect the response rate and ways to increase it. Some resources 5. What is psychometrics? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometrics ? 6. What is credit report? https://www.experian.co.uk/consumer/experian-credit-report.html ? 7. Example of a credit report. http://www.experian.co.uk/consumer/sample-credit-report.html ? Brief Example: Please review the data collection of a small-scale project overleaf. The project is a pilot study to explore if personality can explain the credit behaviour of young people. The pilot targets students from Business School and School of Psychology (the University of Edinburgh). Data collection proposal for a pilot study For young people, who lack previous credit history, it can be difficult to pass the lenders’ credit risk assessment and therefore, obtain the credit. A recent online survey (http://www.uswitch.com/media-centre/2015/02/over-a-million-young-people-refused-credit- more-than-five-times/) reported 57% of younger respondents (aged 18-34) denied credit, as compared to 32% for the whole sample. Lenders rely heavily on past credit history when evaluating a credit application and deciding whether to grant credit or not. Psychometrics (a branch of Psychology that measures a human personality) may offer an alternative information to replace the credit history. The first step in this direction would be to explore if statistical association exists between personality and credit history. Historically, lenders' risk assessment considered borrower’s ‘character’ as an important factor when assessing credit applications, and it is reasonable to suggest that personality is related to repayment behaviour. Yet scientific research on this topic is practically non-existent because of the difficulty of obtaining the credit performance data matched to psychometric profile. There is only a handful of studies and none of them use the UK data. The current proposal intends to explore the data collection process, which later can be extended to a large-scale investigation. Research objectives (ROs) 1) To pre-test the data collection process, in order to mitigate/ manage potential risks;?2) To provide initial insights into which personality traits are associated with credit performance and should be explored further;?3) To make comparisons between Psychology and Business students. Methodology Two types of data are necessary for this project: personality measures and credit performance. Psychometric personality testing is already done by School of Psychology as a teaching tool. Currently there are personality tests from 310 Psychology students. For Business School, large undergraduate courses will be used to recruit participants and conduct the same tests as currently used by Psychology. The credit performance data will be obtained (subject to written consent from each participant) from Experian statutory credit reports. The credit bureaux, such as Experian, collect information from different lenders and collate it for each individual. The bureaux are legally obliged to supply the information they hold on a person when this person asks for it. Each participant will receive instructions how to obtain the report. On providing completed psychometric questionnaires and credit reports for research, the participants will receive £10 of remuneration (including £2 reimbursement for a potential cost of a credit report). The data will be handled in strict confidence and in accordance with ethics guidelines of the University of Edinburgh. After linking the personality data with credit reports, all personal information will be removed and subsequent analysis will be done on the anonymised data.