Aitken Procrastination Inventory—Short Form: A 4-Item Survey for University Students

A 2026 study by Lingxi Zeng developed and validated a brief 4-item survey for measuring academic procrastination. The dataset is based on responses from 1,237 undergraduate students, split into development and validation subsamples. The short form demonstrated a unidimensional structure with good internal consistency and associations with fear of failure and psychological distress.

Use Cases

• Assessing academic procrastination levels based on the 4-item short-form API.
• Investigating correlations between procrastination and psychological distress based on the reported associations with depression, stress, and anxiety.
• Validating new educational psychology instruments using the confirmatory factor analysis and reliability methods described.
• Studying self-regulatory difficulties in higher education based on the conceptualization of procrastination as avoidance-oriented.

Strengths

• Dataset is based on a sample of 1,237 undergraduate students.
• The short form consists of 4 items, making it efficient for use in multi-construct surveys.
• The instrument demonstrated good psychometric properties, including a CFI of 0.99 and an internal consistency (α) of 0.84.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect temporal or source bias inherent to the specific study population.

Provenance

Source

Lingxi Zeng via figshare

Collection Method

Survey data collected from 1,237 undergraduate students, analyzed using Ant Colony Optimization and confirmatory factor analysis.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-21 12:49:11; freshness should be verified.