Svartdal & Steel (2017): Five Procrastination Scales Compared
Svartdal and Steel's 2017 paper in Frontiers in Psychology compared five procrastination questionnaires in a global sample of 4,169 people: the Decisional Procrastination Scale, the Irrational Procrastination Scale, the Pure Procrastination Scale, the Adult Inventory of Procrastination and the General Procrastination Scale. Using confirmatory factor analysis and item response theory, they found the 12-item Pure Procrastination Scale measured the different facets of procrastination better than the three older scales its items were drawn from. A five-item core of that scale, focused purely on irrational delay, performed about as well as the nine-item Irrational Procrastination Scale, and those two came out as the better measures of what procrastination actually is.
| Citation | Svartdal, F., & Steel, P. (2017). Irrational delay revisited: Examining five procrastination scales in a global sample. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 1927. |
|---|---|
| Study type | Psychometric comparison of existing scales; confirmatory factor analysis and item response theory |
| Sample | 4,169 respondents, recruited globally online |
| Scales tested | Decisional Procrastination Scale (DPS), Irrational Procrastination Scale (IPS), Pure Procrastination Scale (PPS), Adult Inventory of Procrastination (AIP), General Procrastination Scale (GPS) |
| Key finding | The 12-item PPS outperformed the three scales it was built from; a 5-item irrational-delay subset of it matched the 9-item IPS; both are better measures of core procrastination than the alternatives |
What the study found
The five scales share one idea, that procrastination is delay which is unnecessary, unwanted and bad for you, but they were built separately and ask about different things. Svartdal and Steel put them all in front of the same very large sample and examined how the items behaved. The Pure Procrastination Scale, assembled by Steel in 2010 out of twelve items taken from the DPS, AIP and GPS, turned out to capture the facets of procrastination better than any of those three parent scales did on their own. Trimming it further to five items about irrational delay lost very little, and that short form behaved much like the nine-item Irrational Procrastination Scale. The older General Procrastination Scale and Adult Inventory of Procrastination fared worse, partly because some of their items measure adjacent things like lateness and poor planning rather than delay you regret.
Why it matters
Every number on this site comes from a study that had to pick a questionnaire, so which questionnaire is best is not a dry methodological question. If two studies disagree about how common procrastination is, part of the answer may be that one used a scale measuring regretted delay and the other a scale measuring general disorganisation. This paper gives the field a defensible default: short, focused measures of irrational delay. It also explains why the definition matters more than the length. Five well-chosen items beat twenty vague ones.
Caveats
This is a psychometric study, so it tells you which scale measures the construct cleanly, not which scale predicts what people do. Kim and Seo's meta-analysis is the reminder there: self-reported procrastination and observed delay are related but not the same thing, and no questionnaire comparison fixes that. The sample was a large online convenience sample rather than a representative one, and all of it is cross-sectional self-report. A scale winning on factor structure and item functioning is a floor, not a guarantee.
Open-access peer-reviewed paper in Frontiers in Psychology, published 3 November 2017. Metadata and sample size verified via Crossref and OpenAlex.
Related
Tuckman's 1991 scaleSolomon & Rothblum's PASSKim & Seo on self-report versus behaviourTypes of procrastinationProcrastination statistics
Frequently asked questions
Which procrastination scale is the most reliable?
On this evidence, the Pure Procrastination Scale or the Irrational Procrastination Scale. Both focus on delay you did not want and did not benefit from, which is the thing researchers mean by procrastination, and both held up well across 4,169 people. The older General Procrastination Scale and Adult Inventory of Procrastination mix in items about lateness and disorganisation.
How many items are in the Irrational Procrastination Scale?
Nine. Svartdal and Steel also showed that a five-item subset of the twelve-item Pure Procrastination Scale performs about as well, so a very short measure is enough if all you need is a general procrastination score.
Does scoring high on a procrastination scale mean anything about my life?
It means you recognise yourself in statements about delaying things you meant to do. That is useful information, and it correlates with real outcomes in the research, but these are research instruments for comparing groups, not diagnostic tests. No score on them tells you anything a clinician would act on.