General Procrastination Scale: Development of Validity and Reliability

Background: Procrastination, generally out, is the practice of carrying out less urgent tasks in preference to more urgent ones, or doing more pleasurable things in place of less pleasurable ones and thus putting off impending tasks to a later time. The primary objective of this paper was to establish preliminary psychometric properties of General Procrastination Scale (GPS)- validity and reliability. The scale. Methods: The final version of GPS was administered on a randomized sample of 140 participants, 69 males and 71 females between the age group of 16 to 27 years. The target population included college students and working younger adults across various regional subdivisions of the metropolitan city of Mumbai. The sample of the test was selected via a Non Probability sampling method of Quota Sampling. Results: The Split Half Reliability was calculated equivalent to 0.711, which was similarly close to the value of Cronabch’s Alpha correlation value, established at 0.714. The General Procrastination Scale was observed to be high on construct validity (0.76) when compared with performance on Lay’s scale of Procrastination. The quartile deviation value was obtained to be 8 and 3 inter quartile ranges were developed for the scale - Q1- 59, Q2- 66 and Q3- 75, where Q2 is equivalent to the median/mean of the scores on the scale. Conclusion: The test is a first of its kind, having been developed and standardized in a relatively collectivist culture and yet in a fairly modernized geographical region, opening grounds for greater research on cross cultural study of procrastination. The scale however has not been standardized on a statistically sufficient large sample of population.