Situational and Personal Determinants of Academic Procrastination

Abstract

Female college students (N = 112) completed a test battery of personality scales and performance tasks at home over four consecutive evenings, under one of eight combinations of the following experimental conditions: Schedule Source (experimenter versus self) × Scheduled Starting Time (strict versus lenient) × Plausibility of the Experiment. Delay in starting, summed over four evenings, constituted the measure of behavioral procrastination. This measure was moderately correlated with high test anxiety scores and low self-regulation. Procrastination was exacerbated when subjects were permitted to schedule the time of their expected completion of the test battery. Significant interactions of specific experimental conditions and specific personal traits demonstrated the situational requirements for trait-behavior relationships to emerge. Findings supported the internal consistency and construct validity of the behavioral procrastination measure. The practical and heuristic applications of a stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) design and the theory-coordinated choice of experimental manipulation and corresponding organismic variable are recommended for future investigations of procrastination.