The Economic Psychology of Everyday Life

Front Cover
Psychology Press, 2001 - Business & Economics - 214 pages

From childhood through to adulthood, retirement and finally death, The Economic Psychology of Everyday Life uniquely explores the economic problems all individuals have to solve across the course of their lives.
Webley, Burgoyne, Lea and Young begin by introducing the concept of economic behaviour and its study. They then examine the main economic issues faced at each life stage, including:
* the impact of advertising on children
* buying a first house and setting up home
* changing family roles and gender-linked inequality
* redundancy and unemployment
* coping on a pension * obituaries, wills and inheritance.
Finally they draw together the commonalties of economic problems across the lifespan, discuss generational and cultural changes in economic behaviour, and examine the significance of other, non-economic constraints, upon individuals.
The Economic Psychology of Everyday Life provides a much-needed comprehensive and accessible guide to economic psychology which will be of great interest to researchers and students.

 

Contents

An lntroduction to Economic Psychology
1
How Can We Study the Economic Psychology of Everyday Life?
13
Psychology Economics and the Economic Psychology of Everyday Life
18
The Early Years The Economic Problems of Childhood
20
Children and Commerce An Uneasy Relationship
21
The Wherewithal
32
The Broader Picture
39
Summary and Conclusions
41
Individual Differences and Economic Behaviour
107
The Mature Consumer
114
Work and Unemployment The changing nature of work?
119
Discussion
125
The Golden Years? Economic Behaviour in Retirement
126
The Retirement Event
129
The State of Retirement
132
Economic Activity After Retirement
135

Becoming an Economic Adult
44
A First Job
49
A First Income
65
First Purchases
68
Discussion
73
Economic Behaviour in the Family
75
The Family as a Dynamic System Changing families
77
The Central Importance of Gender
79
Future Research Problems
93
New Problems in the Future
96
Economic Behaviour in Maturity
99
Frailty
143
Reconstructing the Past
146
Economic Life After Death
147
Concluding Remarks
150
Afterword
152
The New Millennium and the Postmodern Consumer
154
The Future of Economic Psychology
159
References
162
Author Index
201
Subject Index
213
Copyright

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About the author (2001)

Paule Webley, Carole Burgoyne, Stephen Lea and Brian Young are all members of the Economic Psychology Research Group at the Department of Psychology, University of Exeter.