Patience and Patience Regulation: Development and Psychometric Evaluation of Complementary Scales with Alternate Forms

Many individuals likely struggle with patience on a daily or even hourly basis, but the empirical study of patience as a personality trait is still emerging. Recent theoretical work articulates patience as a trait (i.e., as a tendency to react in a particular way in particular context) and differentiates it from the regulation of patience (i.e., as one pathway toward patient reactions). We present the Patient Reaction (P-React) scale and the Patience Regulation (P-Reg) scale to address conceptual and practical limitations of existing assessments related to those constructs. Across 11 samples with nearly 2,000 unique participants (including student and non-student participants), we found that both scales had strong psychometric properties and produced validity correlations that corresponded strongly with a priori hypotheses based on the recent theoretical accounts of the constructs. Two forms of each scale were developed and are essentially psychometrically identical, facilitating their complementary use and their use in repeated-assessment contexts. We believe that the new scales will help advance research regarding important and commonly experienced constructs that have been surprisingly understudied to date.