College student performance and credit card usage

Journal of College Student Development, Jan/Feb 2001 by Pinto, Mary Beth, Parente, Diane H, Palmer, Todd Starr

As with any study, some limitations have the potential to limit the generalizability of our findings. One possible problem area is the nature of the sample, a convenience versus a random sampling. Due to the potentially sensitive nature of the items, we felt that a random sample could have resulted in low response rates and possible result bias. The alternative we chose, approaching individuals in a classroom setting, does have the drawback of being nonrandom. Great pains, however, were taken to select classes with varied cross-settings of majors, departments, and class standings in three different educational institutions, two public and one private, one of which prohibits on-campus credit card solicitations.

Another limitation of this study lies in the potential for social desirability bias, particularly with regard to responses to some of the scale variables. Socially desirable responding has been widely viewed as the tendency for people to present themselves favorably according to current cultural norms when answering researchers' questions (Paulhaus, 1991). This response bias may particularly happen when respondents are unable or unwilling to report accurately on sensitive topics (Fisher, 1993). In this study, students were asked to indicate their perception of how employment affected their academic performance. As we noted, this selfreport format may have encouraged students to externalize blame for poor performance on their job demands. Likewise, students may have felt that stating that they work to pay off credit card debt, regardless of their true motives, is socially desirable. In addition, the respondents' selfreported GPA may have been influenced by social desirability bias. However, the use of selfreported GPA measures is quite common in educational research (Connelly, DuBois, & Staley, 1998; Hensley, 1995; Ristow & Edeburn, 1984). Benton (1980), for example, studied whether university students would accurately report their GPAs and found no significant difference when self-reported GPAs were compared with official records.

Another issue refers to the skewed nature of the GPA categories. Fully 78% of the sample reported their GPAs above 2.5 on a range of 0 to 4.0. Our labeling scheme classified students with GPAs under 2.5 as low academic performers. An argument could be made questioning this label, noting that these students are, in reality, "average." However, in the universities studied, students having GPAs below 2.0 typically do not remain beyond their first year of study, thereby eliminating many of the lower GPA categories.

A final problem stems from this study's limited focus on background factors that can impact the credit card usage. In this study we did address issues such as age, class standing, and gender, but did not consider other factors such as socioeconomic status, social class, and religion that can affect how consumers obtain the knowledge and acquire the skills to make smart decisions in the financial marketplace. Future researchers should include more descriptive variables that may aid in an understanding of the factors that impact credit card spending habits.