Poisson regression for those who received financial education in college are 1.80 (SE 0.07) and 1.50 for those who did not receive finance education in college (SE 0.04). This difference needs special attention because Poisson regression coefficients can be interpreted as the percentage predicted change in financial knowledge scores expected by one unit change in a predictor, not the unit predicted change in financial knowledge scores (Coxe, West, and Aiken, 2009). Thus, an equal percentage change for those with and without financial education will ultimately result in an even greater difference in financial knowledge scores because those who had financial education in college have a higher baseline of predicted financial knowledge scores (i.e., as the value of any number becomes larger, a constant percentage change will result in an increasingly larger absolute change in the number).
For the aforementioned reasons, one intuitive and recommended approach to better understand the results of Poisson regression interactions is to visually plot the marginal predicted financial knowledge scores for those had financial education and those did not across values of each respective independent variable, holding all other variables constant at their mean or reference value (Coxe, West, and Aiken, 2009). Therefore, we depict these marginal mean plots in Figs. 2 and 3, along with Table 4 to demonstrate the interaction effects.
Table 4 shows that the positive relationship between financial experience and financial knowledge score is stronger among those who lack financial education than those who have it. The slope difference test is significant ( 0.07, p 0.05). These findings support Hypothesis 2b. The results indicate that, the financial knowledge gap between those who had finance education and those who did not will narrow as financial experience levels increase. Fig. 2 clearly depicts this point.
The positive relationship between parents’ financial experience and financial knowledge score is stronger among those who lack financial education than those who have it. The