Video: The Canadian Financial Diaries

Jerry Buckland: Thank you very much Brenda. I want to concur with David. Thank you so much FCAC for this awesome opportunity. What a great conference. I would like to talk about a research project I’m involved in called the Canadian Financial Diaries project and because of the state of the project right now, it’s really in its early period.

What I’m mainly going to talk about are its goals and then some very preliminary qualitative insights. There’s a lot more that we’ll eventually be able to share but right now we’re at the early stages. I want to talk about the plan for the diaries and then in order to share some qualitative insights I’ve picked two participants and I want to talk about their stories.

Of course we’ve got more than two but I wanted to narrow down on a couple. What is the Financial Diaries project about? The goals are to use this method to understand the finances and financial lives of vulnerable Canadians in a rapidly changing socio-economic context. We’re looking at low income people and modest income people.

Some of our low income participants are very low income including folks who are working in casual employment and folks who are relying on social assistance. We have both of these types of folks in our project. Secondly we want to adapt the Financial Diaries research methodology to include a qualitative and quantitative dimension.

Many of the projects in the past have focused more exclusively on the quantitative side, capturing the finances of people. That’s great. We are going to do that. In addition we want to gain qualitative insights into people’s lives. There are three components to the project. One is the collecting of the data from our participants but we also have two other components.

One is led by David mentioned Jennifer Robson. She’s leading our project working with practitioners because we want to make sure our results tie in with the work of practitioners. Gail Henderson is leading our policy maker connection. That’s to make sure that the results are in dialogue with what policy makers are doing.

We also have a plan in our second phase to do some innovative work with curriculum and/or some kind of app. Why is this needed? That data that we’re going to generate from the Financial Diaries is needed because we need disaggregated data based on things such as income, age, ethnicity, geography.

Moreover national aggregate statistics shed little light on the causes of financial instability and qualitative research is really well aligned to capture those causal questions that can be later tested. National aggregate statistics shed little light on the finances of vulnerable people and better knowledge is needed to advise better practice and policy.

What does the Diaries look like? It’s a 12 month in-depth exploration with participants where we ask our participants to collect information about their finances, their inflows, their outflows, their spending, their income, all of that on a daily basis and meet with us once a week or once every two weeks where we receive that information.

That’s where we’re getting that information but it’s also interactive. In all of those meetings we’re interacting with our participants. We’re talking about their finances. What are the challenges they’re facing? We also have some additional surveys we do on how people are using their income tax refund, about their financial wellbeing and literacy which offer the opportunity for some really interesting conversations.

I mentioned our participants are encouraged to track their finances daily, meet with us on a weekly basis – yeah, I’ve gone through that. It’s a mixed methodology approach that we’re using and a mixed methodology approach very deliberately from the beginning. We have quantitative methods, qualitative methods and these are in the form of the household financial diaries and the weekly discussions.

The purpose of this is to get a better understanding of both the finances and financial lives of people. In phase one, we have 25 diarists and we are in week 23 on average. Folks have come into the project at different periods so we’ll be finishing up with our first participants next March but the last of them will be finishing in September, over 6,000 transactions approximately right now. We have 18 low income and 7 modest income participants, average age is 42 years old.

88% of our participants are female. 12% identify themselves as Indigenous and 48% born outside of Canada. 72% use internet at home and 96% have smart phones. John Creswell who is one of the pioneers behind mixed methods as a form of research talks about the importance in any kind of instructive and deep understanding of a social phenomenon is that we need both data and stories.

That’s the beauty of mixed methods, that we capture both data and stories about the phenomenon. What I want to share in the couple of minutes I have left is a couple of stories from two of our participants. Eventually we will have both of these, data and stories. Before I do so I want to explain a really important point, particularly when we’re working with low income people.

That is the understanding that different people operate in different contexts. One way to contextualize where people operate is their vulnerability context. The vulnerability context are those characteristics that make the person more susceptible to economic shocks or in the face of economic shocks make the person less able to recover. Issues like education, employment, social capital, income, English skills rise to the top.

There are two sides to vulnerability. There is the individual’s decision making and what they choose to do and there is the context in which they make those choices. If you are in a low income neighbourhood where there’s not many banks you’re going to have a different context to make your decisions than someone who is in a different situation.

In the face of a vulnerability context people choose certain behaviours. These behaviours we’re seeing in our participants in some cases enable people to cope better or in other cases enable them to cope less well. We see things like social capital. They’re searching or not for work, learning new skills, spending habits, thinking ahead.

These are the kinds of things that we’re seeing our participants, the kind of behaviour we’re seeing our participants engage in. I want to talk briefly about Diane and Marina. These are fictitious names of two of our participants. They’re about halfway through the diary process and I’m the interviewer for them. They are both single women. They are in their 50’s.

They’re both casually employed. They have low annual income between $9,000 to $10,000. Previously Diane was relying on social assistance but is very staunch about not going back to that reliance because she uses words like “I would be at their beck and call” and when she discontinued she said “I was free.”

In both cases they have some kind of family or community support. Diane has support from her father and Marina has some support from the community which is complicated and I’ll talk about that in one sec. Housing is more of an uncertainty for Diane because she’s renting and so the rental rates are going up and this is causing some stress for her.

In the face of that vulnerable context what I see with Diane and Marina are different ways that they are trying to cope. Some of them appear to be more resilient and some less resilient. Here are some examples of more resilient behaviour. Both work hard to maintain family relationships or community relationships. With the dad or with the community, both are working very hard to maintain those social relationships.

I mentioned before the complicated community situation for Marina. I won’t go into detail but it’s quite hard for her to maintain that and yet it’s an important element of her resilience. Diane also gets some support from a social agency which is a very important thing for her. They’re both really diligent in their diaries. We’ve seen a range of people’s behaviour with the diary. They’re both very diligent.

They work very hard in the work they do. They’re both very modest with their spending habits. Their time horizons vary, Diane less willing to think of the future, Marina a little more willing to think about the future. There are also some evidences of some less resilient behaviour. Diane for instance struggles to assert her interest in this community connected relationship. She works for a company where she is paid on the basis of when she asks for the pay rather than on a wage rate.

Understandably it’s a very complicated relationship and she has difficulty asserting her interests there. I mentioned about the short term time horizon. Marina on the other hand does not feel comfortable exploring new options like employment. I tried to ask her questions about that and it’s something she’s just not comfortable to talk about.

These are some very preliminary results. We’re just midway through the diaries. These are just some qualitative insights. One final thing though, what can I see might help folks so far, a couple of things – a guaranteed annual income I can see is something we’re going to have to think about very carefully.

It seems to be something that would tie in nicely, also supports to help people get into the workforce. I’m amazed at how limited these supports are in talking firsthand with my participants. Finally banking options – the low fee bank account isn’t working for many people who are trying to control their spending because they want to use the debit card.

To use the debit card they need more than 12 to 15 transactions which are the limit on the low fee account. Thank you Brenda. Brenda and I had a conversation about this and so we need a new vehicle for low income people and banking. Thank you very much.

(Applause)