Life Insurance Purchase Behaviour Through the Theory of Planned Behaviour: A Systematic Literature Review

This paper aims to synthesise how the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) has been applied to explain life insurance purchasing behaviour and to develop a integrative synthesis that addresses fragmentation found in existing literature. Guided by PRISMA 2020, a systematic literature review was conducted across EBSCOhost, Google Scholar and some other databases including ScienceDirect, to identify peer-reviewed studies indexed in Scopus and Web of Science. Twenty-six relevant articles were examined and synthesised across three stages of the purchase process: antecedents, behavioural intentions and actual purchase behaviour. The analysis shows that TPB has been widely used but inconsistently operationalised, with most studies focusing on intention rather than actual purchase or policy retention. Attitudes and subjective norms consistently influence intention, while perceived behavioural control shows mixed effects. Extended constructs such as financial literacy, saving motives, risk aversion, religiosity, trust and perceived risk display context-dependent and often inconclusive effects. Digital, AI-based, and social-media-driven influences remain significantly underexplored. This paper maps TPB constructs in life insurance purchasing behaviour and provides a theoretical synthesis, clarifies inconsistencies in prior findings, specifies mediating and moderating relationships for empirical testing, and establishes a future research agenda that advances the literature on life insurance planning behaviour.