Chapter One. Introduction

1.1 Background of the Study

Personality and social psychologists have long been interested in understanding how personality traits affect the quality of adult relationships (Caspi, Roberts & Shiner, 2005). The economic problems and financial deprivations of families are thought to be partly controlled by their personality traits (Olsen et al., 2010; Exley et al., 2022; Rendall et al., 2021). Emotional instability or neuroticism is associated with more debt and more compulsive purchases (B’ham et al., 2011; Donnelly et al., 2012) and conscientiousness is associated with increased savings, reduced debt and forced purchases (Donnelly et al., 2012; Webley and Nyhus, 2001). These surveys show that very dedicated people are better able to manage their financial affairs and that mental illness is at odds with personal finances. Research by Alderotti et al. (2021) support the negative relationship between income and comfort as well as the positive relationship of the latter with extraversion and openness. They also demonstrated that the positive association of openness and conscientiousness with income was not even affected by education. They conclude that in most of the literature there are strong positive relationships between income and consciousness and strong negative relationships between income and enjoyment. Although there are various reasons within the family, joint family forces couples to divide the daily chores or financially compensate for household chores (Louzek, 2022), which can affect affect household economic/financial deprivation. Thus, personality dimensions can measure the extent of a household’s economic/financial deprivation.