Social Determinants of Opinions about Banks

The objective of the research was to identify and select homogeneous segments of consumers in terms of their competence on the market of the financial services, as well as to evaluate the influence of the consumers’ economic competence on the relations with banks. The sociodemographic features as well as the place that the consumer occupies within the social structures provide a poor explanation of the evaluation of the banks. Opinions about banks are poorly correlated with the socio-economic status of the consumer. There is a weak relationship between the economic status of the consumer and his/her economic competence. There is a strong correlation between the economic competence of a consumer and the overall evaluation of the banks. Four homogeneous groups of consumers were selected in terms of economic competence: Self-excluded (17%), Uninterested (48%), Second-raters (30%), and Leaders (6%). The segmentation was conducted using latent class analysis (LCA). The latent class analysis enabled one to identify the subtypes of the interconnected features which are unobserved in the traditional model. The source of the empirical data is comprised of the field research results conducted by the CAPI method on a nationwide representative sample of the residents of Poland, N=3000.