The impact of attitude variables on the credit debt behavior

Purpose - The present research attempts to address what kinds of attitude variables influence individuals' debt behavior. Although credit card debt has been extensively documented recently, the main focus is on the pure amount of debt. Little research is concerned with the source of credit card debt. This research tries to investigate how different attitude variables affect revolving credit card use and petty installment use which are two main sources of credit card debt. It is generally accepted that attitude variables are one of the causes of credit card misuse. But there is no research to compare the differential effect of each factor in one model. The present research tries to use statistical method to find out the distinctive effect of each attitude factor. Design/methodology/approach - The study was conducted by using mail‐in questionnaires, which were sent to credit card holders who were using or had used either revolving credit or petty installment plans. After reliability and validity tests, stepwise regression model has been used to test the differential effect of each attitude variable. Findings - According to regression functions, it was found that attitude variables had a wonderful explanatory power in accounting for revolving credit use and petty installment use. Specifically, it was found that revolving credit use and petty installment use were closely related to attitudes about credit card, money, and debt. Risk attitude efficiently predicted petty installment use; however, it did not correlate with revolving credit use. Meanwhile, it was found that all of the attitude factors account for 82.1 percent of variance for revolving credit use. In contrast, they account for 41.6 percent of variance for petty installment use. The findings shed light on the role of attitude variables in debt behavior. Moreover, the paper identifies the specific role of different attitude variables, which has great implications for practice. Originality/value - Existing research has significantly clarified credit card debt issues, but there are still some gaps to fill in. For one, although the previous literature tests both separate effects and joint effects, it ignores some important variables, such as attitude variables. Meanwhile, previous research focuses on single variables most of the time, such as credit card attitude and debt attitude, and little research has simultaneously considered a bunch of attitude factors simultaneously. In summary, further exploration of the attitude factors is necessary. Additionally, previous researchers have focused only on the final consequences of credit usage – the outstanding balance or credit card debt rather than the behavior which triggers credit card debt. The present research aims to address these two questions.