The Validity Exploration of General Procrastination Scale (Lay, 1986)

Abstract

Procrastination is defined as the act of “putting off or delaying an action to a later time.” (Bachrach, 2012).
Measuring procrastination is important for better understanding of this so common habit, but also, for diagnosing and therapy of it.
Lay (1986) matched procrastination with traits, big 5 theory, perfectionism, anxiety, agitation, dejection, and self-discrepancy etc. His scale General Procrastination Scale (GPS) consists of 20 items. Responses across items are summed to obtain a single score, and according to the instructions of GPS, the scale is one-factor only scale, with Cronbach alpha of 0,82 (Lay, 1986) and a retest reliability of 0,80 (Ferrari, 1989).
The purpose of this research is to explore psychometric characteristics of procrastination scale by Lay (1986). For this purpose, scale was applied to 480 undergraduate students. Results of this study conformed the evidence of high reliability of scale (α= 0.876). Factorial analysis at first showed five factors that were not interpretable, but rotated factorial analysis by employing Equamax rotation with Kaiser’s Normalization, showed clearer structure. According to this, there are 5 components of this scale:
Factor 1. Good planning: items 8, 14, 15, 18, and 20.
Factor 2. Delaying: items 5,9,11,12 and 19.
Factor 3. Doing things in last minute: items 16 and 17.
Factor 4. Good time management: items 3,4,6 and 13.
Factor 5: Poor time management: items 1,2,7 and 10.