Psychometric Indices of Zuckerman's Sensation Seeking Scale: A Factor for Predicting Students’ Academic Procrastination

In the last few decades, sensation-seeking has been noticed as a complex, dynamic, and multidimensional personality trait that affects risky behaviors. The present study was conducted with the aim of evaluating the psychometric properties of Zuckerman's sensation seeking scale among undergraduate students. Among the undergraduate students of Damghan city 260 people were selected by following the inclusion and exclusion criteria using a multi-stage random cluster sampling method in May 2020. Then, they responded to Zuckerman's (1971) sensation seeking, Pintrich and DeGroot (1990) self-efficacy and McCloskey and Silzo (2015) academic procrastination scales in the same order. The results showed that the four-factor structure of sensitivity to monotony, experience-seeking, adventure, and disinhibition of Zuckerman's sensation-seeking scale had a favorable fit with the data and their internal consistency reliability ranged from 0.61 for adventure to 0.78 for sensitivity. Correlation coefficients of sensation seeking subscales with self-efficacy scale to estimate divergent validity indicated non-significant and negative values in line with hypothesis confirmation. The findings of the step-by-step multiple regression also showed that the components of sensitivity to monotony and adventure could explain 27% of the variance of academic procrastination. It seems that the results of the present study provide evidence for the validity and reliability of the sensation-seeking scale as a strong tool for measuring the risky and sensation-seeking behaviors of adolescents by researchers, therapists, and counselors.