A Survey of Consumer Attitudes Toward Life Insurance Industry in Kenya

Abstract

A questionnaire survey was conducted to measure consumer attitudes towards life insurance in Kenya. The study also attempted to identify demographics of life insurance policy holders, and what attributes of life insurance induce consumers to purchase life insurance policies. Reasons why people do not purchase life insurance was also investigated upon. The study further attempted to establish if there existed a link between attitude and behaviour with respect to owning a life insurance policy. A random sample of 233 respondents was used, and established that life insurance policy holders were typically married people with at least one dependent, often had good education and more likely worked for private companies. Policy holders and non -policy holders alike, found life insurance to be most useful as protection to dependents against economic loss that can result through death of the provider. Consumers demonstrated that life insurance companies suffer poor reputation as do life insurance agents, who they viewed as being opportunistic. Such attitudes were found to be shared among policy holders and non-policy holders, which lead to an inference that the attitude behaviour relationship is not strong with respect to life insurance. The study also established that barriers to entry were low enough to allow newer companies to be competitive.