THE ATTITUDES TOWARD THE EURO ADOPTION IN CROATIA

The purpose of the research is to investigate the attitudes towards the adoption of the euro. The research is exploratory and correlational and uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches. The qualitative part of the research, carried out through the thematic analysis of the participants’ responses, is aimed at investigating the reasons behind the support or lack of support of the participants towards the adoption of the euro, and the quantitative part, through stepwise regression, identified the best predictors of support for adopting the euro. The research was conducted on a convenient sample of 242 participants. The topics that appeared during the analysis of the perceived negative effects of the introduction of the euro are the financial aspect and negative psychological consequences, while the topics that appeared when analysing the perceived positive effects of the introduction of the euro are the advantages of the single currency (e.g. in financial services, business and economy, lending, loans and related costs, etc.), and living standards (e.g. long-term: increase in purchasing power, convergence of living standards). The best predictors of the participants’ attitude towards the introduction of the euro were the perception of whether the introduction of the euro would lower their standard of living, whether they would have difficulty adjusting to the new value of money, and their trust in the European Parliament. The biggest limitations of the research are convenient sampling and the use of thematic analysis on the answers of the participants that were collected in the open-ended questions of the survey questionnaire. For the possibility of wider generalization of the results, it would be necessary to repeat the research on a larger sample, and for a better understanding of the respondents’ answers to the open-ended questions, it would be useful to use in-depth interviews. The use of open-ended questions and systematic thematic analysis is a special feature of this research because the results of the analysis enable new insights to be gained and at the same time the creation of a questionnaire and the application of quantitative methodology in order to check the possibility of population generalization of the obtained findings.