FINFAM
Finance, gender and power: how are portuguese households managing their finances in the crisis?
Portuguese couples’ financial perceptions, choices and practices have never been studied in-depth. This project addresses this gap, as its main goal is to examine couples’ financial management arrangements by investigating: 1) how Portuguese couples manage their household budgets; 2) whether there are gendered patterns in financial family decisions; and 3) the impact of the present economic crisis on household budget management arrangements.
Individual agency in decision making is a cornerstone of orthodox academic economic discourse. However, most people live most of their lives in multi-person households, anchored in a couple, sharing family resources. Economic and financial household decisions cannot be solely motivated by individual self-interest; they must also involve some degree of altruism and cooperation. Since individual household members' preferences are sometimes divergent and conflicting, family decisions are necessarily the result of complex interactions involving interpersonal bargaining, either in an explicit or tacit way. These interactions can be adequately framed as a kind of a “cooperative conflict”, a concept which takes into account, not only issues of individual agency, but also individual’s perception in assessing each other’s interests and well-being and in evaluating each other’s contributions and claims within the family. (Sen, 1983, 1990)
A better knowledge on households’ financial decision processes is crucial for understanding the overall distribution of well-being, power and control over resources. From a normative perspective, this acquires special relevance given the hardship Portuguese households are presently suffering, with decreasing income, growing unemployment, devaluated investment portfolios and rising burden of debts. As a result, a growing number of families are losing their homes. This means that many families are now forced to make remarkable adjustments in their expenditure budgets and living standards. Given the traditional gendered roles prevailing within Portuguese families, it is likely that most of the brunt on the family’s economies will be borne by women, especially the mothers of dependent children.
Although there is a great variety of different allocative household systems, typologies have proved to be useful methodological tools for sociological research. Several different typologies of couple’s money management and control have been proposed in the literature, most notably by Pahl (1980) and by Vogler and Pahl (1993) who have identified six different systems of financial allocation used by British couples. Their findings indicate a complex pattern of interrelationships between household income level, household allocative system and gender roles. This project will draw on this typology, which must be adapted to accommodate the specificities of the Portuguese society, especially in what regards social support networks, occupational structure, education patterns and gender roles.
As most of existent research on other countries is focused on the traditional family (a father and a mother living in the same household with their dependent children, with no other adults), we also opted for studying this particular type of household. This will allow us, not only to better focus on gendered patterns of behaviour within the household, but also to compare the Portuguese case with other countries. However, the innovative nature of this study in Portugal carries a great potential for the advancement of research on household budget management systems and paves the way to subsequently enlarge the research to other household arrangements (eg. enlarged, blended or single-parent families, homosexual couples).
Different complementary methods – ranging from interviews to carefully designed questionnaires and experiments – will be applied in order to identify the various household financial allocative systems and the various meanings and perceptions husbands and wives attribute to them.
The research team involved in this project has highly diversified and complementary fields of expertise – family sociology, social networks, household finances, gender studies, social stratification, behavioural and experimental economics – which assures the scientific, analytical and interdisciplinary skills required to successfully accomplish the project’s goals.
Book; scientific papers; final conference
Couples’ financial management in Portugal
Coelho, L. (2014), “My money, your money, our money: Contributions to the study of couples’ financial management in Portugal”, RCCS Annual Review, 6, 6, 83-101. http://rccsar.revues.org/546
Ferreira-Valente, A. & Coelho, L. (2015), “Gestão das finanças conjugais em tempo de crise económica”, In I. C. Silva, M. Pignatelli & S. M. Viegas (Coord.), Livro de Atas do 1º Congresso da Associação Internacional de Ciências Sociais e Humanas em Língua Portuguesa 2015 (pp. 4749-4765), Lisboa: AICSHLP.
www.omeuevento.pt/Ficheiros/Livros_de_Actas_CONLAB_2015.pdf
Economic Crisis: Impacts in family daily practices and coping strategies
Frade, C. & Coelho, L. (2015), “Surviving the crisis and Austerity: The coping strategies of Portuguese households”, Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 22, 2, 631-664. http://ijgls.indiana.edu/latest/
Ribeiro, R., Frade, C., Coelho, L., & Ferreira-Valente, A. (2015), “Crise económica em Portugal: Alterações nas práticas quotidianas e nas relações familiares”, In I.C. Silva, M. Pignatelli, & S. M. Viegas (Coord.), Livro de Atas do 1º Congresso da Associação Internacional de Ciências Sociais e Humanas em Língua Portuguesa 2015 (pp. 5155-5171). Lisboa: AICSHLP.
www.omeuevento.pt/Ficheiros/Livros_de_Actas_CONLAB_2015.pdf
Andreia Barbas
Catarina Frade
Cristina Maria Coimbra Vieira
Fernanda Jesus
Lina Coelho (coord)
Maria Alexandra Ferreira-Valente
Miguel Oliveira
Rafael Marques
Raquel Ribeiro
Sílvia Portugal