Abstract
BACKGROUND: Procrastination can be defined as voluntarily delaying or postponing a task that is often regarded as important or necessary to do. It often has short-term benefits but high future burdens. The Irrational Procrastination Scale (IPS) is a 9-item self-reporting scale that focuses on the implemental aspect of procrastination and are clearly worded and easy to understand, making it easier for participants to express their opinion. A few efforts have been made to adapt procrastination scales for Arabic-speaking populations and provide procrastination scales to Arabic-speaking populations and countries. The objectives of our study were to evaluate the validity of the Arabic version of IPS, assess its internal reliability and explore concurrent validity of the IPS based on patterns of correlations between procrastination and time perspectives. METHODS: This cross-sectional study was conducted from February to March 2023 and involved 684 young adults, mostly female participants from various regions of Lebanon. The Exploratory-to-Confirmatory (EFA-CFA) strategy was used to confirm the IPS validity. RESULTS: The CFA results revealed that the fit indices of the one-factor model were not good: CFI= 0.923, TLI = 0.898 RMSEA = 0.124 [90% CI 0.111, 0.136] and SRMR = 0.114. Therefore, we randomly split the sample into two groups; an EFA was first conducted on the first subsample (n = 343). Items 2, 6 and 9 were removed since their loading factor was below 0.4. A CFA was then performed on the second subsample (n = 341). The hypothesized one-factor model was specified with six items loading on the latent construct (CFI = 0.990, TLI = 0.984, SRMR = 0.061, RMSEA = 0.087 [90% CI 0.071, 0.104]). The internal reliability of the scale was excellent (α = 0.89 and ω = 0.89). Model fit for configural, metric, scalar and strict invariance was shown. Higher time perspective dimensions' scores, namely past negative, past positive, present fatalistic and present hedonistic, were significantly associated with higher irrational procrastination. CONCLUSION: The validated Arabic IPS provides a reliable tool for screening procrastination, with potential applications in clinical assessment, interventions, and cross-cultural research on its psychological, social, and cultural determinants.