Being busy, feeling poor: The scale development and validation of perceived time poverty

Abstract

Employees across the world feel increasingly time-poor. The advancement of management research on time poverty has, however, been stymied by the lack of a validated measure. We thus aim to develop and validate a measure of perceived time poverty, defined as individuals' perceptions of lacking freely disposable time. We generated the initial items with an inductive approach and examined the content validity of the scale with an item-sort task. We then recruited four separate samples from different cultures to assess the psychometric properties (i.e., factor structure, reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity) and nomological network of a six-item, self-report Perceived Time Poverty Scale (PTPS). The results provide evidence of the psychometric soundness of the newly developed PTPS. We discuss the implications of our scale development and offer suggestions for future research on perceived time poverty.