Adaptive Financial Education and Addiction Recovery: Associations with Self-Efficacy and Treatment Engagement in a Quasi-Experimental Study

Financial stress is associated with substance use disorder severity and relapse. Among individuals entering addiction treatment, financial hardship is highly prevalent. Mechanisms linking financial interventions to addiction outcomes remain underspecified. This study examines whether an adaptive financial education intervention is associated with improvements in financial self-efficacy, delay discounting, and treatment-related outcomes among individuals in addiction treatment and at-risk university students. The study is descriptive; causal claims are not warranted given design limitations. Participants (N = 420; 240 in outpatient treatment, 180 at-risk university students) were assigned by site to 12 weeks of adaptive financial education delivered through an interactive platform with personalized feedback, or to traditional classroom instruction. Multilevel models accounting for site-level clustering tested condition associations with financial self-efficacy, delay discounting, perceived stress, treatment engagement, and relapse intention. With only five sites, between-site variance estimates are unstable and all effects require cautious interpretation. The adaptive condition was associated with larger gains in financial self-efficacy (γ = 8.2, 95% CI [3.1, 13.3], p = .004) and larger reductions in delay discounting (γ = 0.41, 95% CI [0.10, 0.72], p = .012). Financial self-efficacy gains correlated with treatment engagement (r = .34, 95% CI [.22, .45]) and relapse intention (r = − .29, 95% CI [-.41, − .16]). All effects trended uniformly in predicted directions; replication is required before confidence is warranted. Adaptive financial education is associated with psychological outcomes that may support addiction recovery. Findings require replication in randomized designs with active controls and larger numbers of sites.