Financial education for low income and indebted population

Abstract

This paper consists of a Student Internship Experience Report, produced as a compulsory component of an undergraduate Psychology degree at a private university in Campinas, SP, Brazil, as part of the subject Social Psychology held from March to June 2015. The main objective was to provide basic concepts of Financial Education to a small group of individuals and observe its effects in their behavior. The following data gathering techniques have been chosen: field reports, structured observation (the researcher as a participant) and oral reports at conversation meetings. Results show that problem debts, as well as economic prosperity, are the results of a multi-factorial process whose roots and causes reside in one’s subjectivity, life history, family history, environment and culture, where other social players like media, politics, marketing and education can take action. The experiment was meaningful for having offered the student an opportunity to apply academic concepts of Social Psychology and Economics Psychology in real life.