Paying the price: Financial hardship and its association with psychological distress among different population groups in the midst of Great Britain’s cost-of-living crisis
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jackson2025 - p. 2
The study protocol and analysis plan were pre-registered on Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/86nfw/).
jackson2025 - p. 3
Subjective financial hardship was assessed with the question: ‘How well would you say you yourself are managing financially these days? Would you say you are … ’ a) Living comfortably b) Doing alright c) Just about getting by d) Finding it quite difficult e) Finding it very difficult Objective financial hardship was assessed with the question: ‘In the last 12 months, have you been in rent or mortgage arrears?’
jackson2025 - p. 3
sychological distress was assessed using the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K6), which measures non-specific psychological distress in the past month (Kessler et al., 2002, 2010).
jackson2025 - p. 3
The scale had good internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = 0.86); correlations between items are provided in Table S1.
jackson2025 - p. 3
We used multinomial logistic regression to test associations of (i) subjective and (ii) objective financial hardship with psychological distress (no/low distress [reference category], moderate distress, severe distress), adjusted for age, gender, ethnicity, occupational social grade, housing tenure, working status, children in the household, history of mental health conditions, smoking status, and level of alcohol consumption.