What happens when a qualitative/theoretical scholar of gender/sexuality and cultural studies and a quantitative behavioral scientist step outside the boundaries of our respective disciplines, risking disruptions to our normal procedures and cherished political and theoretical commitments? Our unlikely collaboration allowed each of us to explore and challenge the possibilities, limitations, and consequences of our approaches to the study of gender and finance and, ultimately, to make new knowledge. The occasion for this collaboration is the Arizona Pathways to Life Success (APLUS) study, a longitudinal study of a group of young adults to understand how financial practices develop and the factors that shape those practices. We begin by presenting our respective research agendas and our concerns about "engaging the opposition." We then narrate the sequence of our efforts: to talk and think together, generate analyses and interpretations, and then interrupt ourselves-only to begin again. Ultimately, despite (or perhaps because of) our divergent backgrounds, our final set of findings, which reveals the changeability of participation in gendered constellations of financial attitudes and behaviors over time, challenges dominant scientific and popular understandings of the relation of gender to financial behavior and attitudes, with implications across many domains of research, policy, and educational practice.Keywords: Arizona Pathways to Life Success (APLUS) study / family studies / financial behavior / gender / interdisciplinarity / methodology / personal finance / well-being / young adults *Feminist Formations maintains a strict editorial policy in which submissions authored by relatives, close colleagues, or students of the editor, are handled by the editorial board president, rather than by the editor. For the current essay, board president Jill Bystydzienski of The Ohio State University served as editor, selecting peer reviewers, receiving the reviews, making editorial decisions, and maintaining all files related to the submission.
PreludeThis article explores the possibilities, limitations, challenges, and consequences of a deliberate encounter between a qualitative/theoretical scholar of gender/ sexuality and cultural studies (GCS) and a quantitative behavioral scientist (QBS). 1 Each of us is and has been engaged in research on what QBS would call "financial attitudes and behaviors," although the approaches we take in our separate projects reflect our very different disciplinary orientations. Together, we have explored a variety of approaches to analyzing data collected as part of the Arizona Pathways to Life Success (APLUS) study, which is designed to survey the same group of young adults every two to three years into their mid-30s to understand the processes by which they develop financial practices, and the individual and social factors that shape those practices. The initial data for the project were collected from 2,098 first-year students aged 18-23 enrolled fulltime (twelve or more units) at a major land...