Numerical Activities of Daily Living – Financial (NADL-F): A tool for the assessment of financial capacities^‡

‡ The underlying research materials for this article can be accessed at https://osf.io/d9jng/ on the Open Science Framework.

ABSTRACT

Financial capacity is the ability to manage one’s own finances according to self-interests. Failure in financial decisions and lack of independence when dealing with money can affect people’s quality of life and are associated with neuropsychological deficits or clinical conditions such as mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer’s disease. Despite the importance of evaluating financial capacity in the assessment of patients with neuropsychological and psychiatric disorders, only a few tools have been developed. In the present article, the authors introduce the Numerical Activities of Daily Living – Financial (NADL-F) test, a new test to assess financial capacity in clinical populations. The NADL-F is relatively short, yet it encompasses the most common activities involving financial capacities. The NADL-F proved to have satisfactory psychometric properties and overall good validity for measuring financial abilities. Associations with performance on basic neuropsychological tests were investigated, in particular focusing on mathematical abilities as cognitive correlates of financial capacity. Results indicate that the NADL-F could be a useful tool to guide treatments for the enhancement of financial capacities. By sharing all materials and procedures, the authors hope to promote the development of further versions of the NADL-F in different languages, taking into account the necessary adjustments related to different socio-cultural contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Financial capacities
• Normative data
• Activities of daily living
• Ageing
• Cognitive impairment
• Personal autonomy

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Giulia Barra, Silvia Chiappini, and Valentina Galetto for help in data collection and Dr Katie Palmer for assistance with the English revision of the manuscript. During part of the study, Giorgio Arcara was affiliated to the Department of Neuroscience, University of Padova, Padova, Italy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Giorgio Arcara http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6270-6883

Notes

‡ The underlying research materials for this article can be accessed at https://osf.io/d9jng/ on the Open Science Framework.

1 The initial version of the NADL-F comprised a total of 10 tasks. The three tasks price knowledge, guided purchase and financial planning were not included in the final version, since they showed unsatisfactory psychometric properties, especially because of the internal consistency of items. For this reason, these tasks are not analysed further in the manuscript.

2 These tests were part of a larger battery administered to the patients for clinical purposes.

3 The “Bill payments” section of the NADL-F interview was discarded in this step and was not included in further analyses.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Italian Ministry of Health [grant number RF-2009-1530973, to Carlo Semenza]; Ministero della Salute.