Tuckman (1991): The Tuckman Procrastination Scale
Bruce Tuckman's 1991 paper in Educational and Psychological Measurement developed the Tuckman Procrastination Scale, a self-report measure of the tendency to delay or put off tasks. An initial 72-item pool was reduced by factor analysis to a 35-item and then a 16-item version with high internal consistency, and scores were validated against a behavioural criterion, students' actual completion of voluntary self-paced coursework. It remains one of the most widely used procrastination measures in research.
| Citation | Tuckman, B. W. (1991). The development and concurrent validity of the Procrastination Scale. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 51(2), 473–480. |
|---|---|
| Study type | Scale development and validation study |
| Key psychometrics | 16-item version with reliability of .86 (35-item version .90); single general factor |
| Validation | Scores correlated with a behavioural measure, performance of voluntary self-regulated homework, and with a general self-efficacy measure |
What the study found
Tuckman started with 72 statements about delaying, wasting time and avoiding effortful tasks, and used factor analysis on student responses to trim them to a coherent single-factor scale, first 35 items, then 16. The short scale kept strong internal consistency. Concurrent validity came from two directions: higher scale scores went with lower general self-efficacy, and, more convincingly, with actually completing less of a voluntary, self-paced homework programme where points were earned by doing tasks without external deadlines.
Why it matters
Measurement is the unglamorous foundation of everything else on this site: meta-analyses like Steel's and Van Eerde's can only pool studies because instruments like this exist. The behavioural validation matters most, a procrastination questionnaire is only worth using if scores predict what people do when structure is removed, and Tuckman's did exactly that. The scale's framing of procrastination as a self-regulation deficit, putting off what you have decided to do, also anticipated where the field's theory landed.
Caveats
The scale was developed and validated on undergraduates, and item wording reflects academic life. Like all self-report measures it captures how procrastinatory people believe they are, which Kim and Seo's 2015 meta-analysis showed diverges from behavioural measures when predicting performance. A single-factor scale also compresses different motives for delay, fear-driven and boredom-driven procrastinators can produce identical scores for different reasons.
Peer-reviewed scale development paper in Educational and Psychological Measurement. Verified via Crossref.
Related
Solomon & Rothblum's PASS, the other classic measureSelf-regulation, the construct the scale targets
Frequently asked questions
How is procrastination measured in research?
Mostly with short self-report questionnaires: the Tuckman Procrastination Scale, Lay's General Procrastination Scale, Steel's Irrational Procrastination Scale and the PASS are the common ones. Stronger studies add behavioural measures, submission times, task completion, because questionnaire scores and actual delay only partly overlap.