Factor Analysis of Islamic Financial Literacy and Its Determinants: A Pilot Study

Abstract

Islamic financial literacy has been recognised as an important tool to increase inclusiveness. To date however, the constructs for Islamic financial literacy has not been adequately examined even though they have been calls for such attempt in the literature. Thus, this paper aims to develop the constructs for Islamic financial literacy and its determinants. Structured questionnaires were distributed to 200 students of Universiti Utara Malaysia to determine the level of Islamic financial literacy. The data are quantitatively analyzed through an exploratory factor analysis using SPSS programme. The results show that 4 out of 11 measures failed to load reliably in Islamic financial literacy construct. Specifically, religiosity was found to exhibit the highest variance followed by hopelessness and financial satisfaction. This paper enables the community and researchers to expand the knowledge in the area of Islamic financial literacy by providing a validated constructs to assess the level of Islamic financial literacy.