The Role of “Grit” in Overcoming Negative Financial Situations and Increasing Consumer Well-being: An Abstract

Abstract

Research of the quality of life (QOL) has been studied in various ways. One research is that various factors associated with QOL. The other researchers focus on the how to improve the QOL. It is difficult to figure out how to improve the Quality of Life in the different economic situation. However, the capability is one of the important elements of Quality of Life (Sen 1993). Many previous types of research show a result associated with capability and QOL. In this study, we focus on a capability related work. According to the capability theory, there are many different capabilities when people are in QOL. Research on individual capability, income, and QOL have a wide variety of perspectives. Therefore, understanding their relationship mechanism is a very important research problem. In marketing research, understanding this mechanism is important to understand consumer well-being. Based on these research problems, this study confirms the inconsistency between consumers’ capability and QOL to understand how to increase consumer well-being. We compare two models based on a poverty line to identify differences in happiness after achieving a certain income level reported in previous studies. This confirms the discrepancy between the capability and QOL in the two models. A new method for solving the discrepancy is presented. This study investigates the mediation effect of consumer grit level between capability and QOL. This study can suggest ways to solve income inequality and low QOL. There are three conclusions. First, people in poverty had relatively low capability to work. This can be explained by the relationship between income and capability in previous studies (Kuklys and Robeyns 2005). However, the capability in this study suggests objective capability and subjective capability. This significant difference in the presence or absence of poverty can ultimately affect both objective and subjective capabilities. Next, through the structural equation, we confirmed the expected relationship. We could confirm the significant effect of capability on QOL. Also, as expected, poverty had a mediating effect on the relationship between capability and QOL. To be more specific, the ability to overcome poverty has a positive impact on QOL. However, those in poverty could not confirm that the capability has a significant impact on QOL. This confirms the Easterlin paradox claimed in previous studies. Individual capabilities increase but may not directly affect happiness. Therefore, it is more important to diversify the capability for the happiness of individuals. Finally, in this study, we considered a solution through grit in this relationship between capability and QOL. According to our SEM, we have confirmed that the variable grit can be a new solution. Developmentally, we have confirmed that the consistency concept of grit is more effective in grit composed of two concepts.