Development of the questionnaire “Individual’s Financial Autonomy Scale” and its psychometric verification based on a group of pre-retirees

Relevance: the issues of studying subjective qualities of the pre-retiree’s personality, including their financial autonomy, are of particular relevance due to economic instability and uncertainty. The present article is devoted to the problem of measuring financial autonomy in the situation of retirement planning which is one of the indicators of economic and psychological maturity of a person. The purpose of the work is to conduct a psychometric test of the original author’s questionnaire “Individual’s Financial Autonomy Scale” (T. V. Drobysheva, I. V. Larionov, S. V. Tarasov). Hypothesis: an individual’s financial autonomy scale has a one-dimensional structure and is associated with internal locus control and autonomy interpreted as the individual’s independence. Participants: 215 pre-retirees (from 45 to 63 years old) living in different regions of the Russian Federation including 108 women and 107 men, 49% are working and 51% are unemployed. Techniques (tools): subscale “Autonomy” of K. Ryff’s Scale of Psychological Well-Being (adapted by T. D. Shevelenkova, T. P. Fesenko), the Subjective Control Level Questionnaire (compiled by E. F. Bazhin, E. A. Golynkina, L. M. Etkind); the results were processed with the help of the software packages IBM SPSS.22.0, IBM AMOS 19.0, Jamovi 2.4.11. Results: the initial standardization of the questionnaire has been carried out. A check for normality and internal consistency has been performed. The study has evaluated the factor structure, discriminatory power and convergent validity of the questionnaire. The results show that the Individual’s Financial Autonomy Scale has a one-factor structure and is characterized by high indicators of psychometric reliability. Main conclusions: the Individual’s Financial Autonomy Scale is a reliable tool that measures financial autonomy as the ability of a person to manage their finances regardless of the opinions of others, to make appropriate decisions and to take responsibility for them, as well as to monitor their financial state. The study describes differences in the degree of autonomy in different groups of pre-retirees. The practical significance of the research is determined by the necessity to provide targeted assistance to pre-retirees in planning their retirement on the basis of the financial autonomy indicators measured with the scale.