Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

Project Updates

Student Loan Papers

Race: Nilton reported that there have not been many significant findings. He has decided to shift the focus of the paper around anchoring. (Team consists of Nilton, Cathy, Jinhee and Michael)

Gender: 90% done. Looking at gender differences. Not a lot of interesting findings. Same problems with assumption violations. (Team consists of Suzanne, Elizabeth, Jinhee, Barb and Sheri)

Main: Slow moving. Some interesting results. Just needs a jumpstart. (Team includes Travis, Elizabeth, Soo and Michael)

Twitter

Barbara reports that the paper describing the twitter study was accepted for publication in the Journal of Human Sciences Extension.

Housing

Data cleaning still in process. Google doc available for anyone interested in writing a paper from the dataset. Carrie is working on a grant for funding to do the qualitative piece of the main paper. (Update: Grant not funded, but Carrie will continue to work on the qualitative portion of the main paper using software at NDSU. David gave Elizabeth the keys to the data cleaning process and will send her the data in May).

Retirement

The group is close to identifying a dependent variable and key intervention. Working on next steps. The dependent variable may be something along the lines of this question: At what age do you expect to begin spending down your retirement?

Soo suggested using a “promotion vs. prevention” approach. A scale focused on that construct would be available for use in data collection.

Discussion:

            The ASA has done quite a bit in terms of studying SS behaviors.

            Travis: Collecting SS vs Spending down retirement.

            Yilan: Looked at personality and decumulation.

            Elizabeth: General ideas about SS. Do people still us SS as a way to spend in retirement?

            Barbara: Ask people how do you define SS? How do people create their own paycheck?

Elizabeth: People say they’ll keep working but they usually retire at 62. K-State very interested in the age of retirement question.

Barbara: Big gap in actual behavior in terms of when one decides to retire.

Soo, Sheri and Dave suggested starting a panel dataset/longitudinal study as a group.

Yillan: People don’t touch their savings in retirement, they stick to the bare minimum/RMD. To find out what people actually do, we could conduct a focus group of people who have already retired to see what their strategy was/is.

Yilan asked: How do we find a group of people who are retired but are not on pension benefits?

Suzanne: Iowa is doing classes for people one-year away from retiring.

Elizabeth: We keep kind of bumping into the issue of making a retirement decision as a couple.

Where are people getting the idea that there will be no SS in retirement?

Barbara: Content analysis suggestion. Take a look at association websites vs. private websites.

We could do a lit review and a content analysis to show output for the September 2018 report.

2108 Meeting Location

            Sheri Worthy agreed to make the arrangements for next year’s meeting location.

            A date of June 27^th-28^th was agreed upon.

The meeting will start in the afternoon on the 27^th and go until about 5pm that night. We will continue the meeting on the 28^th for the entire work day.

More information to follow regarding the location.

Renewal of NC2172

It was generally accepted that the focus of our next project phase will be on the intersection between Health and Finance (or Family Resource Management as discussed later in the meeting)

Ideas included: collecting our own data (longitudinal), including a wide range of ages, find a gap in existing datasets and collect our own data to fill those gaps, study individual behaviors related to health and finance, use the national framework for health and wellness, make sure we have a random sample for publishing purposes, look into personality differences, include biological factors in our dataset, study retired people with adult children, potential for decision-making studies, look into health care spending and utilization, apply decision-making strategies to health, health and retirement, long-term care, mental health, stress, retirement, rural families, North Central region, contribute to national health and wealth objectives, health disparity, childhood obesity, latinos (latino paradox), gradients of health and wealth.

Data Collection Plans

            One year study to cover the whole five year plan.

            Challenges exist in terms of collecting data if we focus on the elderly

            Unique data has been key to the success of this group.

Data storage

Yilan will send the savings data and the qualitative student loan data up to the Illinois data service system.

Elizabeth will look into some information about ResearchGate and share it with the group if it looks good.

Day 2

4/21/17

Caroline Crocoll

            Fiscal year 2015, NIFA could advertise, but had to be a broader description in behavioral economics some candidates were “good”, but not leaders in “your” field. Narrowed it down to one candidate and the search was a failed search.

            The Rural Sociologist position was filled and that person is capable of doing justice to “our” work. The selection for this position was made but the hiring freeze happened.

            NIFA went from having 9 National Program Leaders to 4 (crushed under workload). Caroline really wants to get this position moving.

            Caroline is meeting with Nancy Montoya soon. JumpStart requires a fee so NIFA has stepped back from participation.

            Susan left a list of partnerships for Caroline to review.

            Caroline will send (and did) the existing listserv to Michael Gutter. Elizabeth will send her list of State Specialists to Caroline.

            Michael: “We don’t help people fix their credit score, we do research to help practitioners learn how to motivate people to fix their credit score.”

            Caroline said she has a lot of ideas on how to help us with our work.

            Aligning with White House priorities:

                        Personal responsibility was mentioned as one of the priorities we could align with. Schematically, there are some things we can do that align with the priorities.

            NIFA Priorities:

                        1^st: Grants!

                        Family Well-Being

                        Community Vitality

                        Financial Capability/Financial Literacy

                        Substance Abuse and Opioids

                        Childhood exposure to lead

                        Financial issues for youth and college-aged consumers

Caroline strongly recommended that we apply for one of the AFRI Grants and suggested that we sit on one of the review panels. Let Caroline know that you are interested.

Jinhee and Barbara will work with JumpStart to help make the transition back onto the NIFA agenda.

Future Direction of NC2172

            Michael mentioned choice sets vs rational decision-making. Our priorities would focus on health and finance, the rural/urban divide and translating our intervention work to application.

            Sharon mentioned some possibilities in qualitative research in Rural/Urban communication and divide.

            Suzanne said our strengths are in consumer decision-making.

            Michael asked if there was a good measure of health insurance literacy.

            Jinhee mentioned that the director of the health literacy center is new at UMD and talked about publishing our future work in health related journals. The authors of those journals usually just use income and education as control variables. An example of a paper she gave was that of diabetes patients making financial decisions.

            Sharon mentioned that hypothetical situations are our bread and butter. Ex: How does uncertainty about health affect my retirement decision-making?

            Nilton said that we need more research on how consumers decide to buy health insurance. What information (heuristics) are consumers using to make a decision? Utility maximization experiments (for any situation, not just health). Look into income shock and how people prioritize their decisions when one comes along.

Four new objectives were agreed upon for the next phase of our project:

1)      Understanding family resource management under uncertainties over life span


2)      Identifying personal characteristics and contextual factors contributing to household financial and health decisions


3)      Understanding how financial capability affects household health decisions and outcomes


4)      Understanding how health conditions affect household financial decisions

A new number will be assigned for the next five years, but we will supply the name of the project.

Michael urged members to review the new objectives prior to our next meeting.

Activities:

1. UGA led a multistate Proposal submitted to NIFA to request funding to study the retirement behavior of farmers and ranchers in multiple states.  

2. North Dakota led a National Bureau of Economic Research housing research grant proposal; it was not funded. 

3. Members of the team won three awards for their work related to this team. 

4. During the fiscal year of 2017 the research group focused on the analyses of our student loan data collected the previous

    year. This data consists of an experimental design component to better understand factors affecting the demand for student loans.

    Data from this survey has already been used in two journal publications where we found significant generational and gender

    differences. We are still working on this survey data to uncover anchoring effects and plan to publish a main paper with overall

    findings, which will be submitted later in 2017.

5.  During last year's meeting the research team also began discussing the analyses conducted by the housing and a retirement subgroup.

6.  Four team members conducted a Twitter Chat in June 2016 to collect data that resulted in a paper recently accepted for publication.

Financial Decisions of Young Adults, NC2172 Research Study in Cooperation with WiseBread #wbchat, June 2. Summary at https://storify.com/moneytalk1/financial-decisions-of-young-adults-57516f34f0ddf1e72bcf292a

7.  The team also submitted a proposal to continue the multi state team for 2018-2023. 

Presentations:

Johnson, C., Kiss, E., Evans, D., Xu, Y., & O’Neill, B. Innovative Data Collection in Social Science Research. American Council on Consumer Interests, Albuquerque, NM, 2017.

Xu, Y., Johnson, C., Bartholomae, S., O’Neil, B. (presenter), and Gutter, M. (presenter) “Homeownership Among Millennials: The Deferred American Dream?” American Association of Family & Consumer Sciences (AAFCS) 107th Conference and Expo, Bellevue, WA, June 2016

Cho, S. (presenter), Xu, Y., and Kiss, D.E. “Understanding Student Loan Decisions: A Literature Review.” American Association of Family & Consumer Sciences (AAFCS) 107th Conference and Expo, Bellevue, WA, June 2016

Abstracts:

Xu, Y., O’Neill, B., Gutter, M., Saboe-Wounded-Head, L., Kiss, D.E., & Evans, D. The Complexity of Retirement Decision-Making: Insights From a Literature Review. Association for Financial Counseling and Planning Education, 2017, 22.

Cho, S.H., Johnson, C., Kiss, D.E., O’Neill, B., & Gutter, M.S.. Student Loan Decision-Making: What We Know and What We Do With It. Association for Financial Counseling and Planning Education, 2017, 44.

Johnson, C., Kiss, E., Evans, D., Xu, Y., & O’Neill, B. Innovative Data Collection in Social Science Research. Consumer Interests Annual (American Council on Consumer Interests), (2017), 1 page. http://www.consumerinterests.org/assets/docs/CIA/CIA2017/CIA%202017%20Johnson%20Kiss%20Evans%20Xu%20ONeill%20Gutter%20SY.pdf.

Awards:

Carrie Johnson won 2016 Emerging Scholar Award for the first paper below: Perceived value of college as an investment in human and social capital.

Members of our team won the "Best Paper in Personal Finance/Consumer Economics" that was published in the Family & Consumer Sciences Research Journal during 2016 (awarded June 2017, announced February 2017) for the paper "Cho, S. H., Mountain, T. P., Porto, N., Kiss, D. E., Gutter, M. S., & Griesdorn, T. (2016). Experimental Design to Understand the Student Loan Decision: A Methodological Note. Family and Consumer Sciences Research Journal, 45(1), 65-76. doi:10.1111/fcsr.12186 "

Johnson, C. L., Gutter, M., Xu, Y., Cho, S., & DeVaney, S. (2016). Perceived value of college as an investment in human and social capital: Views of Generations X and Y. Family and Consumer Sciences Research Journal, 45(2).

Johnson, C., Evans, D., Worthy, S., & O’Neill, B. (2016). Virtual focus groups in Extension research. Journal of the National Extension Association of Family and Consumer Sciences. Available: http://www.neafcs.org/assets/documents/journal/2016%20jneafcs.pdf

Johnson, C., O’Neill, B., Worthy, S. L., Lown, J. & Bowen, C. (2016). What are student loan borrowers thinking? Insights from focus groups on college selection and student loan decision-making, Journal of Financial Counseling and Planning, 27(2).

Mountain, T.P. Gutter, M.S., Ruiz-Menjivar, J. & Copur, Z. (2017). Exploring the Role of Financial Disclosure Forms in Mortgage Type Selection. Journal of Financial Counseling and Planning, 28(2), 285-299. https://doi.org/10.1891/1052-3073.28.2.285

Kim, J., Gutter, M. & Spangler, T. (2017). Review of Family Financial Decision Making: Suggestions for Future Research and Implications for Financial Education. Journal of Financial Counseling and Planning, 28(2), 253-267. http://dx.doi.org/10.1891/1052-3073.28.2.253

Kim, J., Spangler, T., & Gutter, M.S. (2016). Extended families: Support, socialization, and stress. Family and Consumer Sciences Research Journal. 45(1), 104-118.

Xu, Y., O'Neill, B., Gutter, M., Wounded Head, L., and Kiss, D.E., (2017). How Do People Make Retirement Decisions? working paper.

Bartholomae, S., Kiss, D.E., O’Neill, B., Worthy, S., Kim, J., & Jurgenson, J. (2017). Examining gender bias in judging student loan borrowing: An experimental survey on the effect of framing. Working paper to be submitted 2018 to Journal of Family and Economic Issue Special Issue on Student Loans.