The Effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Group Financial Therapy on Financial Literacy, Personal Financial Management and Mental Accounting

The purpose of this study is applied training of financial literacy and personal financial management along with changing and modifying financial beliefs and improving mental accounting using a five-step combined financial therapy model and the commitment and acceptance method. This research was applied and research method was quasi experimental with a pretest-posttest design with control group. The statistical population of the research consisted of the merchants of shahrekord city in 2019, from which 40 people volunteered were selected to participate in intervention sessions and had other criteria for enter and exit the study and randomly assigned to two experimental and control groups (20 people in each group) and completed research questionnaires including financial literacy, personal financial management and mental accounting. The experimental group then received 120 minutes of interventions related to acceptance and commitment financial therapy by ten sessions. But the control group did not receive any intervention. Data were analyzed using SPSS - 25 software. The results of the study using multivariable analysis of covariance showed that in the post-test stage, the mean of mental accounting scores in the experimental group improved compared to the control group and financial literacy scores increased significantly (P <0.01) . The effect coefficient was calculated for mental accounting 0.45 and for financial literacy 0.54. It was concluded that acceptance and commitment financial therapy is effective for improving merchant’s mental accounting and financial literacy. while the financial therapy approach did not has any significant effect on improving the mean of personal financial management scores.