“Sisters are Doin’ It for Themselves”: Creating a Financial Literacy Workshop for College-Aged Women on the Relationship Among Spending, Saving, and Investing

Name: Lesley Chinery
Major: Communication Studies
Minor: Africana Studies
Advisor: Dr. Denise Bostdorff
For my independent study, I created an hour-long virtual financial literacy workshop for college-aged women. The purpose of workshop was to increase understanding of the relationship among spending, saving, and investing. By drawing on scholarly research on persuasion and financial literacy, interviews with experts on economics and facilitators of financial literacy workshops, I planned and facilitated a financial literacy workshop. Financial information can seem very daunting to individuals who have little to no knowledge on or experience with the topic. As such, in considering how to present economic information to college-aged women through the workshop I constructed, I utilized the Cognitive Response Theory and the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM). Cognitive Response Theory proposes that a message is more likely to persuade audience members when they approve of it or, that is, when the message aligns with their beliefs or they find the composition of the message favorable (Benoit and Benoit 22). I employed the two routes of cognitive processing, central and peripheral processing, at different points in planning and creating the workshop such as in advertisements, examples used in the workshop, and the sequence of topics in the workshop.
This study allowed me to be very creative with a rather intimidating topic. I wanted more college-aged women interested in the topic and equipped with helpful information to navigate their own finances. By creating the workshop, I hoped that participants would leave with an increased understanding of the relationship among spending, saving, and investing.
Works Cited
Benoit, William L., and Pamela J. Benoit. “The Cognitive Approach to Persuasion.”Persuasive Messages:The Process of Influence. Blackwell, 2008, pp. 20-31.