Development and Initial Validation of the Two-dimension Time Poverty Scale

Time poverty, characterized by the chronic feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it, is a prevalent issue in contemporary society. Given that people may hold different motivations for what they do, time poverty can result from either having too many “have-to” do things (controlled motivation) or too many “want-to” do things (autonomous motivation). To facilitate a more nuanced understanding of how different kinds of time poverty impact people’s lives, the current research developed a two-dimensional time poverty scale (TP-2) to capture the two kinds of time poverty with two studies. In Study 1 (N = 470), an initial item pool comprising 22 items was developed. Exploratory factor analyses obtained 14 items after removing items with poor loading, and confirmatory factor analyses confirmed a bifactor solution with two auxiliary factors. The results suggested that the TP-2 has good reliability and construct validity. Study 2 (N = 250) replicated the bifactor solution and established the measurement invariance, as well as concurrent, convergent and discriminant validity of TP-2. Importantly, this study found that a higher level of time poverty due to too many “have-to” do things (TP-H) is significantly associated with negative affect and life satisfaction, while the effects of time poverty due to too many “want-to” do things (TP-W) on these outcome variables are nonsignificant. The TP-2 can assist researchers in distinguishing different forms of time poverty and enable individuals to understand their dominant type of time poverty and how to better cope with it.