The Boredom Prone Personality: A Multitrait-Multimethod Approach

Abstract

The present investigation reports the convergent and discriminant validity coefficients for two versions of Farmer and Sundberg’s (Journal of Personality Assessment, 50(1), 4–17, 1986) boredom proneness scale. Boredom proneness, a trait that refers to an enduring tendency to disengage from the environment, has been neglected by the field of psychology despite its theoretical relevance to performance and psychological well-being. This report sought: (a) to validate a shortened 8-item version of the original Boredom Proneness Scale published by Struk et al. (Assessment, 24(3), 346–359, 2017) and (b) to extensively examine the boredom proneness construct that the long and short versions of this scale assess. We employed a multitrait-multimethod approach that assessed a large number of theorized effects simultaneously. We replicated dozens of theorized and/or previously observed boredom proneness correlates (convergent validity) as well as many theorized null effects (discriminant validity). The overall pattern of significant and null effect sizes provided compelling evidence that the original boredom proneness scale as well as the 8 items that constitute the shorter version are valid measures of one’s susceptibility to boredom. We propose that boredom proneness might be an underappreciated yet important theoretical moderator of Person X Situation effects.

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/n34vy/. To obtain the author's disclosure form, please contact the Editor.

Acknowledgments

Gratitude is expressed to the research assistants who were responsible for data collection.

Notes

1 All of the analyses reported here were also done controlling for gender. Anyone interested in these results can receive them by contacting the first author.

2 The internal consistency of the true-false form of the BP scale has ranged from .72 to .79 (Vodanovich et al., 2005). Farmer and Sundberg (1986) reported a KR-20 alpha of .79. In our data the KR-20 alpha = .76, and the Armor’s theta = .81.

3 We would note here that Gana et al. (2019) reported that a large proportion of variance in SBPS scores is explained by measurement error as opposed to trait boredom. We find it unlikely that measurement error is a reasonable explanation for both (a) the confirmation of a complicated pattern of theorized positive effects, negative effects, and null effects in the present report and (b) a 95% overlap in the predictive validities with the original BPS.

4 We thank a reviewer for raising this point.