II. Ways of Describing the Individual Saving Process Psychological Approaches to the Study of Saving It should be pointed out that the review of the literature has presented us with considerable difficulties.As has already been stated, economists have not to any large extent made special studies of the problems concerning individual knowledge, values, and decisions in connection with saving.Nor have psychologists shown any great interest in saving.This means that almost all of the material is only indirectly related to our the- oretical scheme and is difficult to put into systematic form.Researchers who have dealt with the problem of individual saving have had extremely varied backgrounds and aims.A review of their works would require an account of these backgrounds and aims, and we have not considered this to be feasible.It is impossible, for example, without vastly increasing the scope and size of the study, to give an account of business cycle theories, simply because these theories happen to contain some discussion of indi- vidual saving.Nor have we considered it possible, other than very briefly, to report research results or to examine the methodology in the many different studies of individual income, saving, and consumption which abound. 1 These features of a literature review have had to be sacrificed in order to attain a more important goal, namely, that of placing a large number of research efforts within the model to be outlined.A minimum of space has thus been devoted to descriptions of the background and methodological approach of each individual study and of the data presented in the studies.The emphasis is on providing a description of the approaches adopted by various students of saving behavior.We have aimed primarily at providing as complete a coverage as possible of studies with a psycho- logical frame of reference, whereas econometric studies of saving are briefly and incompletely reported.1 Reviews concentrating on research in individual and household economic behavior carried out by means of large surveys, and also dealing with the method- ological problems involved in such studies, have been provided by J. N. Morgan [184, 187].