O comportamento dos jovens do sul de Minas Gerais no ambiente financeiro familiar

Abstract

The objective of the dissertation is to investigate the behavior of low-income young people in the face of family financial issues, which results may support public actions aimed at this group, considering the low level of financial literacy of the population in general, especially for some specific groups such as the young and the poor. For this, a structured questionnaire was applied to students of the 3rd year of public schools in the south of Minas Gerais, whose collected data were interpreted through descriptive analysis and the propositions validated by statistical methods. The main results showed that students usually participate in family financial matters and know how the family budget is used. However, when each construct is individually analyzed, the data seem to show that the group, as a rule, behaves more as spectators than as actors directly involved in dialogue and planning issues. The same happens when analyzing the responsibility of students towards the family budget, because, although they contribute to the payment of household expenses, they also do not hesitate to satisfy some personal purchase desires, in detriment of family budget. Such results suggest that the condition of students' participation and responsibility may be more related to need than to family interest or maturity. On issues involving dialogue and planning, research data point to the lack of practical involvement of the group. In addition, it is worth mentioning the importance of knowing the environment in which the students are inserted, since their tendency to succumb to the culture of consumerism and the influence of socioeconomic factors were present in the research. Finally, an important fact was the expressive number of women participating in the research (68.2%), a result that is out of harmony with the literature, since, although women are considered less financially literate than men, the level of their participation and responsibility showed no differences in relation to them.