Arhan Shaikh
This study examined the structural relationship between perceived parental financial transparency and two outcome domains, objective financial literacy and behavioral decision-making heuristics, among 200 urban adolescents aged 15 to 18 in Pune, India, in what is, to the author's knowledge, the first joint test of these three constructs in an Indian adolescent sample. Guided by family financial socialization theory and Bandura's social cognitive theory, a cross-sectional survey measured perceived parental financial transparency (PFT; 12 items, alpha = .84), objective financial literacy (FL; 12 items, alpha = .73, decomposed into basic and sophisticated subscales), and behavioral decision-making heuristics (BDMH; 10 situational-judgment vignettes, alpha = .75, a researcher-constructed scale that showed a ceiling effect in this sample). Parental financial transparency was not associated with basic financial knowledge or with total behavioral decision-making heuristics, but it was consistently and specifically associated with the sophisticated subscale of financial literacy, a relationship confirmed across bivariate and multivariate tests, and one that helps explain why prior composite-level tests in comparable samples found no relationship at all. Mediation analysis using cross-sectional, same-time-point data found a significant positive indirect association between parental transparency and decision-making, running through sophisticated financial literacy (B = 0.031, 95% CI [0.008, 0.067]), even though the total effect of transparency on decision-making was not significant; this pattern is consistent with, though not proof of, inconsistent mediation (suppression). Female respondents scored higher than male respondents on decision-making (p = .015, uncorrected), despite no corresponding gender difference in financial knowledge, but this comparison did not survive false discovery rate correction for the full family of demographic tests (corrected q = .150) and is accordingly treated as provisional pending replication. Household income showed no reliable association with any study variable, though the sample's restricted income range limits statistical power to detect such an effect and this null result should not be read as evidence that income is irrelevant; family structure showed only a non-significant trend for sophisticated financial literacy (p = .052, non-parametric). The sample skewed toward relatively advantaged, high-literacy households (72.5% postgraduate-educated parents, 43.5% household income above Rs. 2,50,000/month), so these findings describe this segment specifically rather than adolescents in Pune or India generally. Parental transparency predicts sophisticated but not basic financial literacy, suggesting the home operates as a narrower and more specialized channel than current theory or policy generally assumes, with implications for how family and classroom instruction are positioned alongside one another in adolescent financial education.