About this app
Why each decision matters
What to measure
When researchers seek to capture consumers' financial circumstances, income is often the first measure that comes to mind. Yet income and subjective financial well-being capture different aspects of consumer finances and are not interchangeable. This distinction also matters when financial measures are included as control variables rather than focal variables, since choosing a measure that poorly captures the relevant aspect of consumers' financial circumstances may fail to adequately account for its potential confounding effects.
How to ask
Income brackets are often inherited from earlier studies or survey platforms, so they may fail to capture meaningful variation in the target population and become less informative as income distributions shift. Anchoring brackets to published statistics can address these issues, but doing so is time-consuming.
What to report
In our review of the marketing literature, a large majority of income measures did not specify whether income was measured before or after taxes, and approximately one in three did not specify whether it referred to individual or household income.
What this app is based on
Our analyses show that income generally explains more variance in resource-based outcomes, such as expenditure, debt and net wealth. Subjective financial well-being generally explains more variance in appraisal-based outcomes, where households assess their own situation, such as whether they can afford everyday goods, cover an unexpected expense, or expect an adequate pension. We refer to this as financial measure–outcome alignment. The pattern holds across three domains: consumption, financial vulnerability, and wealth accumulation. Our results come from Dutch panel survey data linked to administrative tax records (2021–2022). The Netherlands is a wealthy country with relatively low income inequality and a well-developed social safety net; we did not test whether the pattern is equally strong elsewhere. The suggested question wording follows from the income definition each distribution uses; we did not test alternative phrasings against each other.
Income data version 2026.3 (2026-10-06).