Definitional drift: why procrastination scales do not agree

Katrin Klingsieck, at Paderborn University, published a review in European Psychologist in 2013 that took an unusual approach to a crowded literature: rather than synthesising findings, it examined what the field had been calling procrastination. Her conclusion was that the term covers several partly overlapping constructs, and that the disagreements between research groups are frequently definitional rather than empirical.

The most common working definition treats procrastination as the voluntary delay of an intended course of action despite an expectation of being worse off for the delay. Each element in that sentence carries weight. Voluntary excludes delay imposed by circumstance. Intended requires a prior intention, which excludes tasks never intended in the first place. Despite expecting to be worse off excludes delay that is deliberate and sound — waiting for information, or for a better moment.

What the instruments actually ask

The instruments in circulation implement that definition unevenly. Clarry Lay's General Procrastination Scale, published in 1986, and Bruce Tuckman's scale from 1991 are both widely used and both largely omit the irrationality criterion, so a respondent who delays for defensible reasons scores as a delayer. The Procrastination Assessment Scale for Students, developed by Laura Solomon and Esther Rothblum in 1984, is tied to academic tasks and does not transfer cleanly to other settings. The Irrational Procrastination Scale, developed later by Piers Steel, was designed to isolate the irrationality element specifically.

Frode Svartdal, at the Arctic University of Norway, examined several of these instruments together with Steel in a 2017 paper in Frontiers in Psychology, using a large international sample. The scales correlated substantially with one another, which is often reported as reassurance. Svartdal's reading was more cautious: high intercorrelation among self-report instruments that share item wording and response format is partly a property of the method, and does not on its own establish that they capture the same underlying behaviour.

The "active procrastination" dispute

A clear illustration is the construct of active procrastination, proposed by Angela Chu and Jin Nam Choi in 2005 to describe people who delay deliberately and report working effectively under time pressure. A separate line of work followed, reporting that this group differs from other delayers on outcome measures.

Steel and others have argued the construct is misnamed: if the delay is deliberate, expected to be beneficial and followed through, it does not meet the standard definition at all, and calling it procrastination guarantees that studies including it will disagree with studies excluding it. Kyle Corkin and colleagues raised similar objections on measurement grounds. The dispute has never fully resolved, and both terminologies remain in print.

Self-report against observed behaviour

A further constraint sits underneath all of the above. Nearly every instrument in the field is self-report. Where researchers have compared self-reported delay against observable records — submission timestamps, task logs, session data — the correspondence has been moderate rather than close. Self-reported delay is influenced by how respondents remember, how they interpret the items and what they consider socially acceptable to report.

The practical consequence is a shortage of behavioural outcome measures in a field that studies a behaviour. Klingsieck and Svartdal have both argued for more work using observed indicators alongside questionnaires. Progress has been slow, largely because observational data is expensive to collect and questionnaires are not.

Reading with the caveat attached

None of this makes the literature unusable. It does mean that a reported association between delay and any other variable carries an implicit qualifier: as measured by this instrument, in this sample. Summaries that drop the qualifier report a firmer result than the study produced.