Mañana

Mañana, tomorrow, the word conjures up a laid-back life style. In fact, we often stereotype some cultures as more laid back - Mañana nations perhaps? Are there national differences in the prevalence rates of chronic procrastination?

A recent study published in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology by authors from the U.S., Spain, Britain and Peru, indicate that there are not differences, well not exactly. Joe Ferrari (DePaul University), Juan Francisco Diaz-Morales (Complutense University, Madrid), Jean O'Callaghan (Roehamptom University, London), Karem Diaz & Doris Argumedo (Pontifical Catholic University, Lima) collaborated to collect data from their respective countries as well as Australia and Venezuela. Using a mixture of convenience, snowball and random sampling techniques depending on their circumstances, the authors had 765 women and 582 men complete two measures of procrastination. This was an adult sample with an average age of approximately 40 years, 80% were married with two children, and the authors note that all participants would be labeled as middle-class employed adults by U.S. standards.

Ferrari and his colleagues worked with an assumption based on Ferrari's earlier research (see references below for Ferrari, 1992), that the two procrastination scales, although highly correlated measures of chronic (trait) procrastination, tap avoidance and arousal motivations distinctly. Clarry Lay's 20-item General Procrastination Scale was identified as arousal procrastination, whereas McCown & Johnson's 15-item Adult Inventory of Procrastination was identified as avoidance procrastination. Although Joe and I debate this distinction often, it's important to note this, as these researchers analyze the data to separate what they call "pure" types of procrastination (avoidant and arousal) in their analyses.

Ferrari and colleagues used the "translate, transport and test" method, carefully verifying the translation of the existing measures from English to Spanish for the data collection in Spain, Peru and Venezuela. That said, as the authors note in the concluding comments of their paper this "etic" approach to data analysis does not address the indigenous psychology of each culture, so caution must be taken in the interpretation of the results. For now, what we certainly have is an idea of how samples from each country score on these standard North-American measures.

The Results
At the level of the raw scores on both scales, adults living in the United Kingdom reported significantly higher chronic arousal procrastination compared to adults from Peru, the United States and Spain, with adults from Venezuela and Australia scoring lowest overall. The same results were found for the measure of avoidance procrastination. In fact, the correlation for these scales is typically very high (in the range of 0.65 to 0.75), so the parallel differences are not surprising.

For the Statistically minded readers . . .
Given the significant interrelation between the scales for participants in each country, Ferrari and his colleagues used a technique to examine the non-shared variance between the scales (for the statistically minded, they used standardized z residual scores for each scale by regressing each scale on the other). As they put it, "the use of within-culture z scores allowed us to identify pure interindividual variances within cultures while correcting for between-culture variance" (p. 462) They calculated the percentage of people who obtained a Z residual score of greater than 1.0 for both procrastination types to "purify" the types by eliminating the crossover effects between the distributions.

Once they had created scores for their pure types of avoidant and arousal procrastination for each country, they then repeated their cross-nation comparisons. There were no differences between the countries sampled. The overall percentage of adults sampled who reported procrastination tendencies with the arousal and avoidance motives were 13.5% and 14.6%, respectively.

Concluding comments
The authors report that their study was the first systematic investigation of chronic procrastination with adults across six different nations. Interestingly, although their sample included nations that have been stereotyped as "mañana" lifestyle (Mañana, Spanish for "tomorrow"), the data do not reflect higher procrastination in the Spanish-speaking nations. However, as the authors note, ". . . the causes and consequences within each culture need further investigation to ascertain an indigenous psychology" (p. 463). As I noted above, this will be an important consideration in future research, as this "emic" approach takes into account how each culture defines key psychological constructs.

Overall, this study does clearly indicate that chronic procrastination is a problem for a little over 10% of the adult population. Given the costs associated with chronic procrastination include performance decrements, negative emotions and even poorer health (see previous blog - "I'll look after my health later"), there is cause for concern and a need to better understand how we can deal with chronic procrastination.

Reference
Ferrari, J.R. Diaz-Morales, J.F., O'Callaghan, J., Diaz, K., & Argumedo, D. (2007). Frequent behavioral delay tendencies by adults: International prevalence rates of chronic procrastination. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 38, 458-464.

Ferrari, J. R. (1992). Psychometric validation of two procrastination inventories for adults: Arousal and avoidance measures. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 14, 97-110.