Consumer debt attitudes: The role of gender,debt knowledge and skills

The link between financial attitudes and consumer financial market behaviour is well documented. However, little is known about the role of financial knowledge and skills—the main components of the financial literacy construct—in shaping debt attitudes. This link is especially absent from the gender perspective. This study focuses on consumer debt literacy and debt attitudes. A representative sample of adult Poles (N = 1,004) was participated in a computer‐assisted telephone interview. Latent class analysis was employed to reveal their debt attitudes, and subsequently, links between debt literacy and debt attitudes were studied with multinomial regression models. The results show that respondents in Poland can be grouped into five classes exhibiting different attitude profiles. The structure of debt attitudes is complex and differs from a simple unidimensional pro‐debt/ anti‐debt construct. Although this study did not find significant gender differences either in the conceptualization of debt attitudes or in their drivers, the results showed that in all but one class, consumer attitudes are strongly linked to either debt knowledge or debt skills or to both. Debt skills were revealed to be a particularly strong predictor of consumer debt attitudes.