MEANING OF VALUE FOR MONEY

Student perspectives concerning the meaning of value for money in terms of the student experience during their education in University of East London.



Student perspectives concerning the meaning of value for money in terms of the student experience during their education in University of East London

Survey Methods

Participants

A total of 5college students participated in this study. The sample from Europe was represented by students from Warrick University (UK) and the University of Southwales (UK). Student participants from the U.S. attended California State University, Sacramento, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, and Queens College, City University of New York. The students were asked to complete a questionnaire which included socio-demographic questions and the 60 items of the MBBS (Furnham, 1984).

Instrument

The MBBS used in this research was a 60-item, 7-point Likert scaled instrument developed by Furnham (1984). The MBBS instrument has been widely used because of its reliability with subjects coming from different nationalities, including adults from Great Britain (Furnham, 1984), the U.S. and Australia (Bailey & Lown, 1992), Korean college students (Kim & Jeoung, 1996) and Korean, Japanese, Korean American and Japanese American college students (Masuo et al., 2002).

Procedure

This study utilized EFA to extract a small number of latent variables (factors) from a large number of observed variables (60 items on the MBBS). The questionnaires were completed by 290 college students from three countries. The Asian students came from Wonkwang University in Iksan, South Korea and the University of the Ryukyus in Naha, Okinawa. The Asian Americans were from California State University, Sacramento, University of Hawai'i at Manoa in Honolulu, Hawai'i and Queens College in New York City.

Discussion and Findings from Participants

The multifaceted meaning of money has been investigated using many different perspectives by economists, anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists. Money is not only an instrument of commerce and a medium of exchange for products and services, but also a powerful tool that can cause happiness or dependency. Money is also a multidimensional construct; it is instrumental as well as symbolic in and of itself. There are many dimensions associated with money: power and prestige, retention-time, and good and bad. Money also has consistent relationships with demographic variables such as age and gender, personality variables such as materialism and risk taking, and attitudinal variables such as job and life satisfaction (Mitchell & Mickel, 1999).

Cross-cultural research using the same instrument to measure money beliefs and behaviors was conducted using data from the United States, Canada, and Australia (Bailey, Johnson, Adams, Lawson, Williams, & Lown, 1994). This study will extend the previous study by Masuo, Kim, Malroutu, and Hanashiro (2002) where female Asian and Asian American students were studied. The current study will examine the money beliefs and behaviors of both male and female students from Japan, Korea, and Japanese American and Korean American students using the Money Beliefs and Behaviors Scale (MBBS) developed by Furnham (1984).

Discussion

Money attitudes and behaviors were measured, studied and analyzed for the last three decades, using different dimensions, theoretical frameworks, and speci?city (Bailey et ...