Congratulations…
Congratulations to all of the summer/Fall 2023 doctoral students who graduated in the December 2023 commencement: Drs. Adriana Garcia (Chair: Dr. Babiarz), Danah Jeong (Chair: Dr. Palmer), Malika Dhakhwa (Chair: Dr. Babiarz), Marty Cotwright (Chair: Dr. Chatterjee), Pan-ju Chen (Chair: Dr. Warmath), Yu Zhang (Co-chairs: Drs. Fan, Chatterjee), Yingyi (Tracy) Liu (Chair: Dr. Chatterjee).
Congratulations to the AFCPE® Quiz bowl team comprising of Bennett Colbert, Cole Lefont, Zane Rosenbaum, and Josh Brumbach (Mentor Faculty: Dr. Michael Thomas) on placing second in the 2023 AFCPE® Quiz bowl.
Congratulations to Financial Planning graduate Fardosa Hassan on being selected as one of UGA’s three recipients of the Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Graduate Fellowship.
Congratulations to social entrepreneurship student Elizabeth Finley (Mentor: Dr. Dee Warmath) for their presentation in the Sustainable UGA Semester in Review event. Elizabeth spoke about the incredible program she developed called "Greek Goes Green".
Congratulations to HMP major and UGA Volleyball player Sophie Fischer on being recognized as the 2023 SEC Player of the Year.
Congratulations to Dr. Travis Mountain on receiving the SBDC grant as a Co-PI.
Dr. John Grable on receiving the 2023 Financial Therapy Association Hall of Fame Honors Award.
Congratulations to Drs. Megan Ford, Kristy Archuleta, Joseph Goetz, and Jerry Gale (HDFS) on winning Outstanding Conference Paper Award at the 2023 Financial Therapy Association conference.
Dr. Kristy Archuleta also won the Outstanding Instructor Award, and FHCE alumnus Dr. Wookjae Heo won the Outstanding Researcher Award at the 2023 Financial Therapy Association conference.
Dr. Brenda Cude and her co-author were recognized at the 2023 National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) Conference in Orlando for their published research entitled “The impact of state surprise medical billing protections on consumers with employer-sponsored health insurance” that was published in the Journal of Insurance Regulation.
Dr. Lu Fan was selected to the 2024 cohort of the UGA Rural Engagement Workshop for Academic Faculty.
Prof. Sherle Brown received the 2024 FACS Creswell Award! Creswell Award is named after the first dean of our college, this award recognizes a current or retired faculty or staff member who has provided leadership in motivating and guiding students.
Several recent graduates informed us of successfully passing their CFP® exam this past this November. The list included: Amy (Ya-ting) Yang, Andy Li, Anna Schermerhorn, Anthony Rodriguez, Caleb Ray, Daniel Mosseri, Garrett Herold, Hannah Reed, Layla Greenwood, Paige, Kim, Sloane Fox, and Sydney Veilleux. MSNT-FP/MAcc students Chaht Kumar and Robert Burgess passed their CPA exams.
FHCE faculty Dr. Effie Antonoudi successfully defended her dissertation and graduated with her PhD in Personal Financial Planning from Kansas State University in Fall 2023.
Other news…
Dr. Jermaine Durham successfully organized the 2023 GICH Fall Retreat at the Georgia Center, along with Dr. Kim Skobba and other members of the GICH team. The Fall retreat had record attendance, and was a tremendous success.
In Oct 2023, Dr. Peng was invited to deliver a lecture titled "Searching for interpretability: Leveraging GPT-4 to evaluate Covid-19 data visualization in media coverage" in the MARC symposium on computer vision and visual communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In Nov 2023, Dr. Peng was invited to deliver a lecture titled "Battlegrounds or Playgrounds? How Media Actors Leverage Content Strategies for Audience Engagement" in the computational social science speaker series at the University of Texas-Austin.
Drs. Grable, Carlson, and Sages were invited by the CFP Board to serve as speakers and panelists at the CFP Board Registered Programs conference. And Dr. Watkins was invited to attend the CFP Board Diversity summit.
Dr. Kimberly Watkins has become an affiliate faculty member in the Institute of Women's Studies at UGA in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.
Alumna Katie Seay was promoted to President at her firm The Trust Co. in Manhattan, KS. And alumni Stephen Gunter and David Ward were promoted to Partners at Bridgeworth Savant Wealth Management in Birmingham Alabama.
Research
Cude, B., Groshong, L., Burns, B., & Weber, R.M. (2023). LTCI rate increases and reduced benefit options: Insights from interviews with financial planners. Journal of Financial Planning.
Long-term care insurance is one strategy to manage financial uncertainties. Yet this product has itself become a financial risk for policyholders who have experienced rate increases and uncertainty about possible future rate increases. The intent of this article is to help financial professionals better understand why long-term care insurance rate increases are occurring and their clients’ options when faced with a rate increase. The focus is on traditional stand-alone long-term care insurance policies. This article reports the results of interviews with 14 financial planners. All had experience advising clients who had received long-term care insurance rate increase notices. The research was initiated and funded by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ (NAIC) Center for Insurance Policy and Research.
Fan, L., & Lei, S. (2023). Financial well-being, family financial support and depression of older adults in China. International Journal of Bank Marketing,41(6), pp. 1261-1281. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJBM-05-2022-0214.
The findings indicate that both objective and subjective financial well-being matters in relation to depression symptoms and, therefore, to the overall mental health of the Chinese elderly. Developments in public policies are needed to promote accessible financial services, assistance programs, mental health services and facilities for the older population in China.
Fan, L., Green, L. E., & Park, N. (2023). Financial stressors and alternative financial service use: Extending the ABC‐X model of family stress. International Journal of Consumer Studies. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijcs.13002
This study's purpose was to examine factors associated with alternative financial service (AFS) use among US consumers. The conceptual framework for this study was developed from the ABC-X model of family stress with the purpose of identifying the interrelationships among financial stressors, economic hardship, negative credit experiences, and the use of AFS. Using the U.S. National Financial Well-Being Survey and the structural equation modeling method, the results showed that financial stressor was not directly related to AFS use but were through two indirect routes: the financial stressor was positively linked to negative credit experience and then to AFS use; the financial stressor was positively linked to economic hardship, to negative credit experience, and then to AFS use. Economic hardship was positively associated with consumers' negative credit experiences. Negative credit experience was positively associated with the use of alternative financial services. The findings provide theoretical and practical implications.
Johnson, P. L., McCoy, M., Watkins, K., & White, K. J. (2023). Encouraging Money Conversations Among Black, Hispanic, and White Households: Lessons for FCS Professionals. Journal of Family & Consumer Sciences, 115(4), 30-35.
As a follow-up to White et al.’s (2021) “We Don’t Talk About That”: Exploring Money Conversations of Black, Hispanic, and White Households, this article examines social capital and financial conversations among racial and ethnic groups. Although most people avoid discussing money, Blacks and Hispanics have the fewest financial conversations. When they do have money talks, Black and Hispanic individuals are more likely to have conversations with friends rather than with partners, family, or professionals. This article uses research to recommend techniques that family and consumer sciences (FCS) practitioners and educators can use to help families cope with the discomfort that may arise and increase their money conversations.
Kim, S. D., & Carswell, A. T. (2023). A theoretical development of agent specificity. Housing and Society, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1080/08882746.2023.2289777
This study is a short research note that sets the theoretical foundation of an agent’s contribution to a real estate sale transaction. We argue that an agent’s contribution with specialized knowledge or information over a transaction makes an agent irreplaceable. We term this unique contribution agent specificity based on the transaction cost theory, where the production is delegated to an outsider with specialized skills or knowledge. For the modeling part, we base our theoretical model on the fundamental matching model in search theory. Our agent can be a listing or buyer’s agent, and we proxy agent specificity by the level of effort an agent invests in a transaction. We find that an agent will increase her effort by an increase in the property’s sale price, and this effort would increase during boom periods. However, an agent would contribute less to the transaction during bust periods.
Kruger, M., & Grable, J. E. (2023). A test of the spender‐saver perception scale. Financial Planning Review, e1170. https://doi.org/10.1002/cfp2.1170
The purpose of this paper is to present insights into the development, testing, and use of the Spender-Saver Perception Scale—a scale that measures a person's perception of their romantic partner's financial behavior on a continuum from spender to saver. This paper offers support for a tool—the spender-saver perception scale—for use in research and practice. The scale is particularly useful in providing context for reports of lower financial satisfaction when objective measures of financial well-being do not correspond to what someone might be experiencing.
McCoy, M., Watkins, K.; White, K., Kahler, R., & Reiter, M. (2023). The importance of being a “client” for financial planning students: A thematic analysis of financial planning students’ experiences meeting with a planner. Journal of Financial Counseling and Planning. DOI: 10.1891/JFCP-2022-0077
This article examined financial planning courses, which encourage students to meet with a financial planner and write about their experience. The findings included: (a) insights into what it would be like to be a financial planner, (b) decreased anxiety after seeing the planner, (c) better empathy regarding the client’s experience, (d) increased respect for the interpersonal skills required to do financial planning, and (e) receiving personal and professional benefits to seeing a financial planner. Implications for both Certified Financial Planner Board Registered Programs and existing financial planners are provided based on these results.
McCoy, M. A., Molchan, S., Archuleta, K. L., & Ponciano, I. (2023). You Are Your Best intervention: Utilizing Person-of-the-Therapist Training in Financial Therapy. Journal of Financial Therapy, 14(2), 3.
The field of financial therapy recognizes the importance of the therapist's self in facilitating effective client outcomes. Self-exploration involves a comprehensive exploration of the therapist's relationship with money, allowing them to leverage their experiences, financial flashpoints, and money scripts ethically and effectively. By engaging in self-exploration, financial therapists become role models for their clients, inspiring them to embark on their personal growth journeys. However, therapists must exercise caution to avoid projecting their beliefs onto clients. This paper explores how one specific program on the self-of-the-therapist exploration, the person-of-the-therapist model (POTT; Aponte, 1982), can be applied to financial therapy self-work. This approach to self-exploration highlights the significance of self-knowledge, awareness, and management in facilitating effective financial therapy. It emphasizes discovering one’s signature theme (patterns, thoughts, or emotions that create challenges in functioning) and their role in shaping therapists' client interactions. Additionally, the use of one’s own and their client’s genogram can facilitate insights. This article introduces a hypothetical case illustration to demonstrate POTT’s application to financial therapy. By embracing the POTT framework, financial therapists can enhance their self-awareness, manage their personal experiences, and optimize their therapeutic effectiveness, thus contributing to clients' financial well-being and personal growth potential.
Mukerjee, S., Yang, T., & Peng, Y. (2023). Metrics in action: how social media metrics shape news production on Facebook. Journal of Communication, 73(3), 260-272. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqad012
Social media metrics allow media outlets to get a granular, real-time understanding of audience preferences, and may therefore be used to decide what content to prioritize in the future. We test this mechanism in the context of Facebook, by using topic modeling and longitudinal data analysis on a large dataset comprising all posts published by major media outlets used by American citizens (N ≈ 2.23M, 2015–2019). We find that while the overall effect of audience engagement on future news coverage is significant, there is substantial heterogeneity in how individual outlets respond to different kinds of topics. A handful of right-wing media outlets are more likely to respond to audience engagement metrics than other outlets, but with partisan politics topics and not with entertainment-oriented content. Our research sheds new light on how social media platforms have shaped journalistic practices and has implications for the future health of journalism in the United States.
Peng, Y., Yang, T., and Fang, K.. (2023). The dark side of entertainment? How viral entertaining media build an attention base for the far-right politics of The Epoch Times. New Media & Society. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448231205893
Abstract. To amplify their audience reach, far-right outlets need a calculated and coordinated array of acts to set the stage for audience attention and to build a communication network that spreads their messages. We examined the Facebook newsfeed history of The Epoch Times (N = 117,274 posts from 2013 to 2020), which transitioned from a niche anti-China publication to an influential player in US far-right politics. We found that US partisan issues helped the outlet attract immediate audience engagement, but such content did not invite audience growth and engagement with future content. In contrast, viral entertaining videos, while seemingly benign and mundane, demonstrated superb effects in getting audience responses, accumulating followers, and boosting engagement with subsequent posts. We argue that entertainment media is a crucial component of the extreme politics landscape that directs the flows of political attention, which could exert a “ripple effect” on assembling audience networks.
Peng, Y., Wen, T. J., & Yang, J. (2023). A Computer Vision Methodology to Predict Brand Personality from Image Features. Journal of Advertising, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2023.2250842
Using the computer vision method, this study proposes an analytical model of visual aesthetics for brand communication and analyzes the effects of visual features (i.e., colors and visual complexity) on brand personality. This study illustrates a four-step procedure correlating computationally coded visual attributes with human ratings of perceived brand personality. This study has important methodological implications for advertising researchers and practitioners.
Peng, Y., Lock, I., & Ali Salah, A. (2023). Automated visual analysis for the study of social media effects: Opportunities, approaches, and challenges. Communication Methods and Measures, 1-23. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19312458.2023.2277956
To advance our understanding of social media effects, it is crucial to incorporate the increasingly prevalent visual media into our investigation. In this article, we discuss the theoretical opportunities of automated visual analysis for the study of social media effects and present an overview of existing computational methods that can facilitate this. Specifically, we highlight the gap between the outputs of existing computer vision tools and the theoretical concepts relevant to media effects research. We propose multiple approaches to bridging this gap in automated visual analysis, such as justifying the theoretical significance of specific visual features in existing tools, developing supervised learning models to measure a visual attribute of interest, and applying unsupervised learning to discover meaningful visual themes and categories. We conclude with a discussion about future directions for automated visual analysis in computational communication research, such as the development of benchmark datasets designed to reflect more theoretically meaningful concepts and the incorporation of large language models and multimodal channels to extract insights.
Qi, J., Chatterjee, S., Worthy, S., Herndon, K., & Wojdynski, B. (2024). Using an extended post-acceptance framework to examine consumer adoption of fintech. International Journal of Bank Marketing. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJBM-10-2022-0448.
The study introduces a revised EPAM framework with antecedent factors, fintech proficiency and risk tolerance to investigate the factors associated with consumer adoption of fintech-based products and services. The key findings of this study validate the EPAM in the American context. Additionally, this research is among the first to have confirmed the direct relationship between perceived security and fintech adoption. The results have practical implications for existing fintech companies, banks and financial institutions, policymakers and financial advisory practices considering adopting fintech-based services for their clients.
Reiter, M., Qing, D., Watkins, K., & White, K. J. (2023). Race/Ethnicity and Financial Advice Seeking: An Examination of Three Datasets. Journal of Personal Finance, 22(2). https://www.iarfc.org/publications/journal-of-personal-finance/current-issue-of-the-journal
The US population is becoming more diverse, and more Americans are seeking professional financial advice. Various datasets contain questions about consumers' financial advice seeking behaviors, but the measures are not the same across the board. The purpose of this study is to identify determinants associated with seeking financial advice in multiple datasets using a diverse sample. This study uses the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances, the 2018 National Financial Capability Study Investor Survey 2018, and the 2012 National Financial Capability Study State-by State Survey. In all three datasets, Black consumers seeking financial advice were less likely to be married, had lower average objective financial knowledge scores, were less likely to have access to emergency funds, and had lower homeownership rates than their White counterparts. Hispanic respondents had lower average objective and subjective financial knowledge scores, were more likely to be employed, and had less access to emergency funds when compared to White respondents. All non-White consumers seeking financial advice were less likely than their White counterparts to be sixty-five and older, but in most instances, reported higher risk tolerance levels. Asian/other respondents exhibited the fewest differences when compared to their White counterparts. Implications for financial professionals and researchers are discussed.
Totenhagen, C. J., Li, X., Wilmarth, M. J., Archuleta, K. L., & Yorgason, J. B. (2023). Do couples who play together stay together? A longitudinal dyadic examination of shared leisure, financial distress, and relationship outcomes. Family Process. https://doi.org/10.1111/famp.12869
We examined whether shared leisure offers protection against negative associations between financial distress and relationship quality (satisfaction and commitment) for lower- and higher-income couples. We expected husbands' and wives' reports of shared leisure would be protective of the effects of financial distress (Time 2) on relationship satisfaction (Time 3) and commitment (Time 4) for higher-income couples (but not lower-income couples). Participants were drawn from a nationally representative, longitudinal study of US newly married couples. The analytic sample included both members of 1382 different-gender couples with data across the three sampled waves of data collection. Shared leisure was largely protective of the effects of financial distress on husbands' commitment for higher-income couples. For lower-income couples, higher shared leisure exacerbated this effect. These effects were only found at extreme levels of household income and shared leisure. When considering if couples who play together stay together, our findings suggest that it can, but it is critical to understand the financial situation of the couple and the resources they may have to support shared leisure activities. Professionals working with couples should consider their financial situation when making recommendation to engage in shared leisure, such as going out for recreation.
Zhang, Y., & Fan, L. (2023). An examination of mobile fintech utilization from a stress-coping perspective. Journal of Financial Counseling and Planning. 4(3): 354-366, DOI :10.1891/JFCP-2022-0061.
This study examines associations between a set of financial stress factors and three types of utilizations of mobile financial technology (fintech) from a stress-coping perspective. With data from the 2018 National Financial Capability Study, the results indicated that financial stress, perceived overindebtedness, and stressful financial stressors were positively related to the usage of mobile fintech for fundamental financial task management, mobile transaction, and mobile banking. Policy makers need to be aware of the opportunities generated within the growing fintech industry and its potential role as a stress-coping resource for consumers experiencing financial stress, perceived overindebtedness, and financial stressor events. Financial practitioners, educators, and institutions can apply the findings of this study as they develop and promote financial services and products through mobile devices to create greater access for individuals to cope with financial stress and difficulties.
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