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The EARN-Health Trial of Financial Savings and Health

NCT02185612 · Status: COMPLETED · Phase: NA · Type: INTERVENTIONAL · Enrollment: 678

Last updated 2021-09-28

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

The current literature in social epidemiology and public health suggests that low financial savings has an unsurprising negative relationship with subjective well-being, and increases the odds of making visits to a healthcare provider, receiving a chronic disease diagnosis, and experiencing medical disability. Earn.org is a community-based non-profit based in San Francisco with a mission to help low-income workers build lifelong savings habits and financial capability. The organization is one of the largest providers of "goal-based savings accounts" or "matched savings accounts" in the US. The investigators propose to conduct a randomized controlled trial to determine the health effects of Earn's savings program. Through this trial, the investigators will test three principal hypotheses: (1) Participants in the Earn account, as compared to a control group, are hypothesized to demonstrate improved scores on mental health scales assessing depression and anxiety.

(2) Participants in the Earn account, as compared to a control group, are hypothesized to experience lower odds of harmful behaviors associated with stress, specifically tobacco and alcohol abuse. The investigators hypothesize that the effect on behaviors will be of smaller effect size, and more delayed, than the effect on mental health outcomes, judging from similar effects observed in the micro-credit literature.

(3) The mediating variables between Earn account participation and beneficial health outcomes will include increased optimism and internal locus of control.

Conditions

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Savings program

The intervention is a web-based centralized savings account, which is a secure online account without fees. The account offers eligible savers nominal financial rewards for each deposit they make, as a financial incentive for savings.

Sponsors & Collaborators

Principal Investigators

  • Sanjay Basu, MD. PhD · Stanford University

Study Design

Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Purpose
PREVENTION
Masking
SINGLE
Model
PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age
18 Years
Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2016-10-31
Primary Completion
2018-04-13
Completion
2018-04-13

Countries

  • United States

Study Locations

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Entities

Diseases
Companies

Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT02185612 on ClinicalTrials.gov