Academic functional procrastination: Validity and reliability study

Abstract

When the relevant literature about Procrastination behavior, also known as postdating of tasks, is studied, it is stated that this behavior isn't always negative and there can be functional procrastinations, as well. Functional procrastination represents an acceptable frequent behavior which increases success at work, makes persons more advantageous and acts as a success strategy towards a pre-designed goal that generally results in success at work. It is seen that procrastination behavior, mostly seen among students, is not sufficiently researched because of the fact that there aren't any scales, functional features of which are improved. Within this context, the objective of the research is to develop a scale that can assess the functional procrastination behavior of the students. For this reason, total 365 students of different demographic features and in different grades are taken into account. Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was applied to the scale for the structure validity of the scale, and single factor structure became apparent. Then, Confirmatory- Factor Analysis (CFA) was applied to the relevant structure. This CFA analysis was performed with new data taken from 295 students. After the Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was performed, concordance values of Academic Functional Procrastination Scale was found as follows: X2 /sd= 55.08/ 27 (2.04); RMSEA, .05; CFI, .96; GFI, .95; NFI, .94; IFI, .97; and RFI, .90. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.