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Abstract
Financial service professionals work daily to systematically help change their client’s behavior as a way to improve each client’s financial well-being. The role of stress in describing overall life and financial well-being is a topic that has garnered researcher, practitioner, and policy maker attention over the past two decades. Generalized stress has been found to be an important factor in describing someone’s subjective evaluation of their life situation. Little is known about the association between generalized stress and financial well-being. The purpose of this study was (a) to identify the associations among variables known to be associated with financial well-being, (b) to test the pathways toward financial well-being in a proposed model that included a generalized stress variable, and (c) to examine the direct, indirect, and total effect of generalized stress on financial well-being. Using the National Financial Well-Being Survey (2017), this study employed a structural equation modeling technique to analyze the data. The tests described in this dissertation were framed using a financial well-being model first introduced into the literature by Shim, Xiao, Barber, and Lyons (2009). Generalized stress was hypothesized in this study to be negatively related to financial well-being because (dis)stress is generally thought to alter an individual’s decision-making approach, resulting in sometimes in the implementation of problematic strategies and behavior. To date, few studies have focused on the association between generalized stress and financial well-being. This dissertation adds to the existing body of literature by documenting a significant negative association between generalized stress and financial well-being. In addition to evaluating the association between generalized stress and financial well-being, this study proposes a new conceptual framework that can be used to guide future financial well-being research. The model suggests that financial well-being can be better described through the incorporation of generalized stress, in addition to financial knowledge, financial attitude, financial subjective norms, perceived financial behavioral control, socioeconomic status, financial capability, and problematic financial behavior. The major findings of this study are expected to provide insights into interventions that financial service professionals, policy makers, and researchers can incorporate into practice.