- Original authors / creators
- Maria Rosa Miccoli; Yury Shevchenko; Paola Iannello; Ulf-Dietrich Reips
- Original publication
- PLOS One · PLOS · 2025-04-21
- License & retained notices
- CC BY 4.0
© 2025 Miccoli et al
Article-specific license evidence ↗Exact license notice
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Article-specific license URI: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ - Edition changes
- Narrative paragraphs and references retained with whitespace normalization; figures, tables and display equations remain in exact retained XML and original source, not the reader edition.
- Evidence limits
- Adjacent research, not a directly sampled family-office study. Applicability to a family office requires separate assessment. To increase the interpretability of our findings, it is fundamental to discuss the limitations of our study and lay the groundwork for future research. First, we employed a convenience sample because it is considered acceptable for addressing specific research questions about specific populations [65]. However, this approach limits representativeness and generalizability to the broader population of emerging adults. Future research should employ probabilistic sampling methodologies to enhance generalizability. For instance, online platforms (e.g., Prolific) enable pre-screening of participants, which facilitates the study of specific populations while improving generalizability. Secondly, for simplicity and practicality, we focused on only two countries, each representing a model of transition to adulthood [4]. Examining only one country per model restricts the generalization of results to other countries within those models. Including additional countries could clarify the role of different models of transition to adulthood in subjective financial well-being. Future research could adopt a large-scale study approach involving collaborations with laboratories across Europe for translation and data collection [80]. Thirdly, we used traditional measurements of financial literacy, financial behavior, and future orientation in the financial domain. While these measures were appropriate, incorporating additional ones could provide a more nuanced understanding of their relationship with subjective financial well-being. The relationship between financial literacy, financial behavior, and subjective financial well-being remains complex. Although a weak positive correlation between financial literacy and financial behavior was observed, neither significantly impacted subjective financial well-being. Future research should identify which components of financial literacy and financial behavior contribute more effectively to subjective financial well-being. For financial literacy, employing measures of perceived financial knowledge, along with the measure of objective financial literacy [28,29] could clarify whether one of those facets of financial literacy explains subjective financial well-being. For financial behavior, our exploratory analysis suggests that this measure may comprise multiple components, with “Caring for financial matters” showing a positive relationship with subjective financial well-being. Future research should examine whether the components observed here for the Financial Behavior Score [34] scale are replicable across different populations, and further investigate the role of “Caring for financial matters” in subjective financial well-being. Future orientation is crucial in financial behavior and decision-making, yet the relationship between future orientation and subjective financial well-being remains unclear. Future research should explore why we observed that individuals with high future orientation experience lower subjective financial well-being. In this study, we used a measure commonly employed in financial well-being research. However, future studies could include scales examining the influence of the future on current decisions and the perceived temporal distance of the future, such as the Future Time Orientation Scale by Coscioni and colleagues [81]. Finally, we developed an ad hoc measure of trust in financial professionals, which demonstrated adequate reliability. However, the lack of a validated scale for this measure represents a limitation of our study. Future research should validate psychological scales measuring trust in financial professionals and clarify its role in subjective financial well-being. Such scales should also be built from response options recently developed in survey methodology following more widespread use of online surveying [82], visual analogue scales (VAS). These scales have been shown to provide greater precision and usability, lead to less psychological reactance among participants, and provide more adequate characteristics for parametric statistical analyses [83,84]. Despite these limitations and the need for future research, the present study offers valuable insights with important theoretical and practical implications.
- Retraction / correction check
- No retracted-publication label in the retrieved Europe PMC record or Crossref update-to/updated-by notice. XML metadata screened for retraction. Publisher article page searched for explicit correction/retraction/concern notices; see verification record. These bounded checks do not cover unlinked or unregistered notices and are not exhaustive independent retraction clearance. Verified 2026-11-05. Automated/source checks are not human peer review.
- Preserved record
- Rights and full text checked 2026-11-05. Included in this volume on 2026-11-05. Original source dates remain unchanged.
Download the preserved source
SHA-256 (retrieved artifact): 72b5cbb80abe67d296e51efdd747644e19241fe3ccb736664c0434cd8ecda29e
SHA-256 (preserved text edition): df7efc3dc84732073f90df2946c4ad60c7d14b27242a2c5ee37d8b6f99190bb6