Household financial decision making: Qualitative research with couples

partner. 
The male partner 
may now veto the 
decision, e.g. if he 
does not like any of 
the options to have 
emerged from the 
research.
Both partners are 
involved in the final 
discussion(s) and 
feel that they 
contribute to it 
collaboratively.
Decision

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Attitudes to financial decision making
To summarise, women tended to have more influence across the decision-making process, and were 
often behind its instigation. Men’s reported involvement varied, although most felt that they had an 
integral role at the final stage. 
Lastly, individual income did not appear to influence the tasks that partners undertook, or their level 
of influence: that one partner earned significantly more than the other, did not necessarily mean 
they had more influence on the decision-making process, or its outcome.

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18
Decision-making typologies
3 Decision-making typologies
One aim of the research was to identify any emerging decision-making typologies for couples, 
describing groups of couples with similar characteristics. This chapter describes the process for 
identifying groups within the couples who took part in the research, and goes on to discuss these 
groups in turn.
3.1 
Creating typologies
In order to identify groups with similar behaviour within the 24 couples, we created several matrices 
based on the emotions that participants typically exhibited – to greater or lesser extents – when 
discussing financial decision making. Because financial confidence and emotional factors were 
drivers of behaviour, we decided that ‘daunted’ versus ‘confident’ were the most suitable emotions 
for the x-axis, and ‘relaxed’ versus ‘stressed’ for the y-axis. We assigned each participant a position 
on the matrix, before linking partners together.