The study of developing financial literacy scale for university students: Evidence of Inonu University

While financial products that develop and differentiate rapidly with technology allow for derivatives of financial products, on the other hand, this complexity negatively affects market participants. In today's demand-driven financial environment, early age consumers face the issue of making complex financial decisions and the cost of wrong financial decisions made at an early age is high. With increasing financial literacy levels, the financial welfare level of young people will also increase. In this context, in this thesis, it is aimed to develop a financial literacy scale at the level of university students and to determine the financial literacy levels of the undergraduate students of Inönü University. Within the scope of the research, a pilot study was applied to 400 undergraduate students studying in the 2019-2020 academic year and the developed scale was applied to 460 undergraduate students. The scale consists of three factors and 22 items under the headings of financial knowledge, financial prudence, and borrowing attitude. The financial literacy variable was compared with the socio-demographic, socio-economic, and descriptive variables. As a result of the research, a statistical difference was found between variables such as age, faculty, university degree level, income, maternal education status, whether maternal has accounting and/or financial education, paternal occupation, frequency of following economic-financial of developments and the level of financial literacy. There was no significant difference between paternal education, maternal occupation, and credit card debt paying frequency and the level of financial literacy. Keywords: Financial Literacy, Scale Development, University Students, Exploratory Factor Analysis, Confirmatory Factor Analysis