The challenge of assessing financial literacy: when methodology could make a difference

The assessment of financial literacy levels is nowadays widely recognized as necessary to both design effective financial education and evaluate its actual impact. Nevertheless, financial literacy has been assessed through different methodological approaches across studies. To address the lack of a common and agreed upon methodology to measure financial literacy, in 2011 the OECD-INFE network developed a core questionnaire [1] to be administered across a wide range of countries. The present paper focuses on the assessment approach used to evaluate financial literacy among the Italian adult population through the administration of the OECD-INFE questionnaire. The study proposes alternative methods – Item Response Theory and Classification and Regression Trees – to treat the survey data, thus showing that different methods to analyze data could lead to diverse outputs. The study highlights the crucial role that the methodology issue plays in assessing financial literacy. Specifically, the paper suggests that financial literacy research should open up to alternative and new methodological approach in order to obtain ever more reliable measures of financial literacy, genuinely able to capture and effectively address the educational needs of different population groups.