A systematic literature review on non-familial financial socialization

Abstract

This systematic review rooted in the theories of planned behavior, ecological systems, and social learning aimed at analyzing the non-familial agents in financial socialization from existing studies, following the PRISMA framework. Using the articles indexed in Scopus from 2010 to 2025, this study analyzed the screened documents using VOSviewer for keyword co-occurrence, and co-citation. This network analysis helped arrive at the agents of direct impact in financial socialization, and pointed at highly cited articles in this domain, displaying the flow of interconnection between studies. A further bibliographic coupling on VOSviewer helped analyze the top journals publishing articles in this area. A trend analysis using Bibliometrix gave a thematic map showing the basic, motor, niche, and emerging/declining themes, revealing digitization as a prominent motor theme, driving the present discussion. While recent studies have highly focused on the financial curricula in educational institutions and their impact on financial behavior, factors like peer influence, media exposure, and informal earning mechanisms that are relevant in everyday life specifically in financial decisions, were found to be lacking research – the subsequent scope. All-in-all, this review offers insights on current state in non-familial factors in financial socialization, and further identifies areas of opportunities for future studies.