Despite continued growth in the number of credit cards in issue and the amount
of credit card lending in the UK (Rowlingson and Kempson, 1994; Social
Trends, 1998), few of our interviewees felt comfortable with using credit cards
as a source of financing[7]. This aversion to credit cards as a ready form of
short-term credit is echoed in a survey reported by Livingstone and Lunt
(1993), which found that people in debt often cite the convenience of using
credit and access to high credit limits as contributory causes to their financial
problems.