Roslyn Russell

The Adult Hope Scale (AHS) is a widely used measure of hope and is reported to contain two distinct but interrelated constructs of agency (motivation to achieve goals) and pathways (planning routes to goals). Hope is thought to play a key role in the wellbeing of older people and while the AHS has been validated in young/middle-aged adults, the factor structure remains to be tested in older adults. Using computer-assisted personal communication, the AHS was completed by 1454 older Australians (726 F, age (mean (sd)) = 66.4 (5.81) y, range 55–84 y) stratified according to gender, location (metropolitan vs non-metropolitan), retirement status (yes/no) and age (55–65 vs 65 + y). Dimensionality was tested by (i) bifactor modelling (one-factor, two-factor and a bifactor model with a general factor, Hope, and two specific factors, Agency and Pathways) and (ii) exploratory graph analysis (which uses community detection algorithms to cluster variables into factors). Cross-gender invariance was also tested. Hope scores were compared between demographics and wellbeing (i.e. WHO-5 mental wellbeing and positive/negative coping questionnaire) groupings. Both bifactor modelling and exploratory graph analysis reveal that the AHS is unidimensional. Gender was shown to be invariant. Hope scores were comparable between demographic groupings, but higher scores were observed in older adults with higher mental wellbeing and positive coping with effect sizes in the small to medium range. This study confirms that the AHS is a unidimensional scale and can be used to reliably measure hope in older Australian men and women.

Summary: Economic abuse is a form of intimate partner violence that involves one partner controlling or restricting, exploiting or sabotaging the economic resources of the other partner. Little is known how economic abuse manifests in young people’s relationships or how to prevent it. This study explored young adults’ experiences of economic abuse and identified the factors associated with economic abuse in their relationships. Twenty-four young adults (18 women and 6 men) aged 18–29, were interviewed in-depth using both unstructured narrative and semi-structured interview questions. Thematic analysis was used to identify forms of economic abuse. Common experiences of economic abuse included: exploitation of financial and other resources, controlling access to money, damage to property and sabotage of employment and study. The contextual factors included lack of awareness of economic abuse, valuing love and relationships over money and fear of conflict and rejection. We argue that economic abuse prevention strategies should target young adults in their relationship formation stage and take into account the context of relationships and the issues young people face when venturing into cohabitation.

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate how economic abuse manifests in young adult relationships from the perspective of practice experts to inform the role of social marketing in economic abuse prevention. Practitioners were asked for their views on prevention strategies at the individual, relationship, community and societal levels. Design methodology/approach: Twenty-four experts were interviewed using a semi-structured interview schedule. Thematic analysis was undertaken. Findings: Experts reported that young adults experienced economic exploitation, adverse economic entanglement and economic control. Young adults’ frame of reference was a challenge for practitioners. Experts believed that more work needed to be done to improve the financial literacy of young adults. Research limitations/implications: Practitioner views provide one side of the story. A separate study has been established interviewing young adults to explore these issues further. Practical implications: The authors argue that prevention and intervention strategies need to focus on young adults who are in their critical relationship formation stage. The identified attitudinal factors present a challenge to policy, prevention and service providers. Originality/value: The authors shift the attention from service engaged women leaving violent relationships to young adults who have not sought assistance from community or domestic violence services. In doing so, they highlight the importance of the relationship formation phase. This paper raises the challenge for social marketers to consider appropriate prevention and intervention programmes for this cohort. Current and future campaigns and programmes need to be designed and evaluated with an economic abuse lens.

The introduction of money into previously non-monetary, alternative economies can lead to many socio-cognitive tensions, if money is perceived as having been imposed from the ‘outside’, and disconnected from traditional ways of life. In this paper, we employ the lens of institutional theory to frame the phenomenon of money-use in remote Indigenous Australia. Through an immersive study in two remote communities, we develop themes of socio-cognitive tensions that arise as a result of disparity in exchange logics governing marketplace exchange in monetary marketplaces vis-a-vis historically non-monetary alternative economies. We draw upon emergent insights, and derive macro-marketing implications for the design of marketplace-literacy education, aimed at alleviating these tensions and enhancing well-being.

We analyse focus group discussions about long-run (retirement) financial decisions, and explore the extent to which participant responses are related to the oft-used behavioural explanations of financial choice. We find that persons of all ages understand the importance of long-term savings, but face many challenges in preparing for retirement. There is mixed support for a range of associated behavioural explanations. Complexity, relevance of decisions, and uncertainty come up repeatedly in all focus groups, irrespective of the age of the participants. The use of heuristics, confidence, costs of mistakes, mental accounting, and the importance of social interaction appeared of less immediate relevance to all groups. We discuss the implications of these findings for how the financial services and superannuation industries communicate with members. There appears to be a general view from the focus groups that breaking large, complex retirement decisions into more manageable pieces (based on personal circumstances) and providing more focused and relevant information to investors would result in more effort and care expended on retirement decisions.

The mobile phone has increasingly become a channel for providing access to formal financial services. There is a need to understand how financial service offerings, increasingly accessed through mobile phones, impact marketing interactions, specifically marketing exchange activities and social network relationships, to enhance consumer well-being (CWB) in subsistence marketplaces. Through interviews and contextualised observational research in rural Cambodia, findings reveal that the impacts of mobile money services on marketing interactions in relation to CWB can be categorised at two distinct levels. The first-level impact is the actual physical money transfer transactions as part of the marketing exchange activities which leads to the second-level impact on the social network relationships at interpersonal, social group and cultural levels. Drawing from these insights, policy-makers and industry stakeholders can formulate strategies and develop innovative service offerings through mobile phone technology to enhance CWB in subsistence marketplaces.

In the last few decades, payday lending has mushroomed in many developed countries. The arguments for and against an industry which provides small, short‐term loans at very high interest rates have also blossomed. This article presents findings from an Australian study to contribute to the international policy and practice debate about a sector which orients to those on a low income. At the heart of this debate lies a conundrum: Borrowing from payday lenders exacerbates poverty, yet many low‐income households rely on these loans. We argue that the key problem is the restricted framework within which the debate currently oscillates.Key Practitioner Message: ● Framing payday borrowing as a problem of market failure leads to one‐sided and ineffective regulatory responses; ● Until governments instigate real alternatives for cheap and readily available credit, and broader anti‐poverty measures, curbing access to payday lenders can have the perverse effect of increasing privation; ● For practitioners seeking to abolish payday lending, campaigns for higher wages and a liveable social welfare income are central.

A healthy creative arts industry can contribute significantly to the economic and social fabric of a community. Unfortunately, regional areas often suffer from a lack of supply and demand for the creative arts. This article explores the demand for the creative arts in three regional locations in Victoria, Australia, using three broad dimensions of demand: attitudes towards the arts; frequency of participation in the arts and level of expenditure on the arts. The analysis of demand patterns uses the general modelling approach of Lévy-Garboua and Montmarquette ( 1996 Lévy-Garboua, L and Montmarquette, C . 1996. A microeconometric study of theatre demand. Journal of Cultural Economics, 20: 25–50. [Crossref] [Google Scholar] ) as a basis and makes use of the ordered probit class of models for its statistical analysis. The study confirms that individual levels of demand are contingent on a range of demographic characteristics and also identifies factors such as festival attendance and increased past creative arts expenditure as being important determinants of demand for the arts.