Introduction
Time perspective is a psychological construct that refers to “the often non-conscious process whereby the continual flows of personal and social experiences are assigned to temporal categories, or time frames, that help give order, coherence, and meaning to those events” ([
1], p. 1271). In other words, it represents the different ways in which the flow of one’s personal experiences is partitioned into temporal categories or time zones [
2]. During the last decades, time perspective has gained a growing research interest due to its potential utility in understanding how this construct relates to a wide range of psychopathology and human behavior. Previous studies have, for example, documented significant and relevant associations between time perspective and depression, anxiety symptoms [
1,
3,
4], aggression [
1], risky driving [
5], substance use [
6,
7], maladaptive personality traits [
8], self-esteem [
4], self-regulation [
9], self-efficacy [
10], coping behavior [
11], subjective well-being [
12], life satisfaction [
13], happiness [
14], and academic achievement [
15]. For instance, boredom and sadness predicted a perceived slowing down of the passage of time [
16]. Additionally, depressed individuals overestimate the likelihood of negative events in their future, undervalue the prospect of positive events, and have dark expectations for the future [
17]. As for alcohol use disorder, a rational decision to engage in heavy drinking may depend on individuals thinking about, or placing greater value on, the positive short-term effects more than they think about, or ‘dis-value’, the negative longer-term effects—i.e. having more future-orientated time perspective [
18]. On the other hand, Konowalczyk et al. revealed that adolescents who had a positive perspective exercised more and had more self-esteem and, as a result, did not seek to engage in risky behaviors [
19].
With the raise of awareness about the relevance of temporal psychology in the fields of clinical psychology and psychiatry, a number of measures have been developed to assess this entity, including the Adolescent and Adult Time Inventory–Time Attitudes Scale [
20,
21], and the Temporal Focus Scale [
22]. Nevertheless, these are rather narrowly focused measures, exclusively reflecting affect and cognitions, respectively; which may limit investigations and understandings of the time perspective construct. One of the first developed and largely used research instruments designed to assess broader facets of the time perspective construct (i.e., affect, cognition, and behavior) is the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI; [
1]). The original ZTPI is composed of 56 items and five dimensions, i.e. (1) past positive (PP), which evaluates happiness and warmth regarding past events; (2) past negative (PN), which evaluates an overall sense of pessimism about past events; (3) present fatalistic (PF), which relates to the feeling of being powerlessness over life and the fate as determined by uncontrolled external force; (4) present hedonistic (PH), which describes the feelings of risk taking, pleasure, and enjoyment of life; and (5) future (F), which describes plans of achieving long-term outcomes and goals.
Apart from its utility in community research, the ZTPI has recently been recognized as a valuable diagnostic, preventive and therapeutic tool in clinical practice [
23]. For these reasons, the original version of the ZTPI has been translated to different languages and validated in different countries, including France [
24], Spain [
25], Ukraine [
26], Russia [
27], Portugal [
28], Brazil [
29], Greece [
4], the Netherlands [
30], Serbia [
31], Sweden [
32], Mexico [
33], Japan [
34], and Algeria [
35]. All these versions supported the validity and reliability of the ZTPI to assess individual differences in five time perspective categories. Its invariance across many countries and cultures has also been demonstrated [
36]. At the same time, the original version has been largely criticized for its numerous limitations. Indeed, due to its length, the original ZTPI may be challenging to administer for both the clinician (or researcher) and the examined individual, especially where resources and time are a concern. This has resulted in the use of the incomplete scale (only three-time perspective or fewer instead of all five dimensions, e.g., [
5,
37‐
40]); which has led in turn to missing information. In addition, the original 56-item ZTPI has presented factorial validity issues [
41]. Therefore, several brief versions have been designed with the purpose of overcoming these gaps (36-item [
36], 25-item [
42], 20-item [
43], 17-item [
44], and 15-item [
45,
46]), by removing the items with the lowest factor loadings and reducing the number of estimated parameters [
41]. The ZTPI-15 has been considered as “the most comprehensive validation of a short ZTPI” [
41]. To our knowledge, the 56-item ZTPI is the only version that has previously been validated in the Arabic language in 2009 among Algerian university students [
35]; and no Arabic brief versions exist so far.
The present validation study
The subjective self-perceived temporal perspectives or time duration and synchrony has been shown to vary across cultures [
47]. For instance, people in “clock-time” cultural contexts strictly adhere to punctuality and schedules, while people in “event-time” cultural backgrounds tend to rely more on the natural flow of social events [
48]. Although these cross-cultural differences may possibly be blurred by the globalization, accelerated pace-of-life worldwide and spread of multitasking; the way Arab individuals deal with time, perceive pace-of-life, or view the present, past, and future still has its specificities. Arab people often deal with time based on God willing (“inshallah”), lack of punctuality (failure to stick to appointments between family and friends), perceived shortage of time (“I do not have time”), huge time waste (e.g., customers are most of the time asked to wait or come back next day in governmental institutions), and a highly required flexibility (e.g., people may spend hours waiting for an appointment or a late meeting) [
49]. To highlight the perception of time perspective in Arab countries, studies showed that the current time of economic crises in many Arab countries, those with insecure economic situations incline to move away from a focus on the future of saving and investing toward a more pragmatic routine, living each day as it comes [
50]. Another study [
49] revealed that Arab people are mostly oriented by the present-hedonistic and future and are not really oriented by fatalistic issues. In addition, the same study shows that there are significant differences among the five dimensions of TP and no balance in TP is recognized as a main prerequisite for psychological health, happiness, satisfaction in life, self-esteem and general wellbeing.
However, it is worth noting that research in this area is scant in the Arab world. We could identify only two studies focusing on time perspective, the Algerian validation study mentioned above, and another study that used the original 56-item English version of ZPTI among 122 community adults living in five Arab countries (Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Sudan) [
49]. One of the main reasons for this scarcity of research is the lack of psychometrically sound and convenient-to-use measures.
In this context, we aimed to examine the psychometric properties of an Arabic translation of the briefest version of the ZPTI (i.e. the ZPTI-15) in terms of factor structure, internal consistency, discriminant validity as well as gender invariance in a sample of community Arabic-speaking Adults from Lebanon. We expected that the Arabic version will confirm the five-factor structure of the scale, and will show adequate internal consistency reliability, appropriate discriminant validity, and measurement invariance across gender groups.
Discussion
In the present study, we aimed to translate into Arabic and validate the shortened 15-item version of the “Gold standard” measure of time perspective, i.e. the ZPTI. Our findings suggest that the Arabic ZPTI-15 is internally consistent and psychometrically robust. As such, this brief and easy-to-use measure enables the conduction of future research in the field to purposively provide comprehensive insight into the time perspective patterns and correlates in Arab countries and the broad Arabic-speaking community globally.
CFA revealed that the five-factor model exhibited a good fit to the data, thus aligning with the original [
1], other short forms’ validations [
36,
42‐
44], as well as the English [
45], Czech and Slovak [
46] 15-item versions of the ZTPI [
45,
46]. Besides, our findings demonstrated that the five ZTPI-15 subscales yielded a McDonald’ omega ranging from 0.43 to 0.84. Similarly, the validation study of the Czech and Slovak versions of the ZTPI-15 showed good internal consistency, with a Cronbach’s alpha varying from 0.65 to 0.78 [
46]. Other previous translations also showed adequate internal consistency of the ZTPI as evidence by appropriate Cronbach’s alpha values (e.g., French (0.70–0.79) [
24], Spanish (0.64–0.80) [
25], Swedish (0.65–0.84) [
32], and Lithuanian (0.63–0.79) [
65]). We also found that multi-group CFA ascertained the invariance of the Arabic ZTPI-15 scale across gender at the configural, metric, and scalar levels; thus confirming that the 15 items were understood in the same way by our male and female participants. Consistently, gender invariance has previously been demonstrated with other short versions in different populations [
47,
66]. These findings, therefore, suggest that the Arabic ZTPI-15 is recommended for future research on time perspective, and is useful for gender comparisons among Arabic-speaking people.
Our findings support divergent validity of the Arabic ZTPI-15 by showing positive correlations between past negative, present fatalistic, present hedonistic dimensions, and psychological distress; as well as negative correlations between past positive, future focused dimensions, and distress. These results were expected, and further confirm the findings of the validation study of the 15-item ZTPI [
45] which demonstrated identical patterns of correlations with outcome variables to those of the long ZTPI. Having an increased sense of positivity towards the past predicts better psychological health and well-being [
67] and enhances life satisfaction [
45]; whereas endorsing a negative or unpleasant view of the past relates to greater psychological distress [
1,
4,
68,
69] and reduced life satisfaction [
70]. In line with our findings, previous studies also highlighted that both hedonistic and fatalistic present positively correlated with more severe depressive and anxiety symptoms [
1,
67,
71]. In addition and similar to our results, Papastamatelou et al. found that Present Fatalistic and Past Negative orientations were linked to higher levels of perceived stress among Greek students [
72]. Overall, negative attitude towards the past, hedonistic attitude towards life, and a hopeless/fatalistic view of present seem to be consistently involved in psychopathology and distress [
17], while positive past and general future orientation seem to negatively predict positive psychological indicators [
73].
In line with a previous study [
74], our results showed that higher means past positive and future focused scores, as well as lower means present hedonistic scores were significantly found in married people compared to single ones, proving the Zimbardo’s (1999) hypothesis that married people with a positive experience in the past tend to see positive prospects for their future. Furthermore, marital status as a predictor of the past, present or future time perspective determines how the person perceives and reacts to the world. Thus, the family context in which the people are, in turn, determines expectations (positive or negative), as well as the readiness and skill to interact with the environment, to get to know their selves and to develop their abilities [
74]. In addition, through the family, the continuity in the social development is ensured. The marriage is thought as a source of well-being that brings social and personal benefits in human life [
75]; hence, marriage may itself lead to a surge in the expectations of each individual about their lives. This has been called the protective effect of marriage [
76]. In other words, married people look forward to the future through the eyes of their children.
Our findings revealed that higher mean present fatalistic score was found in participants with a secondary level of education or less compared to those with a university education level, in line with a previous study [
77]. Academic achievement was positively associated with positive attitudes toward the future and negatively associated with present fatalistic attitudes. In other words, individuals who achieved academically were more optimistic about their future and less pessimistic about their present than their less academically achieving counterparts.
Study limitations
This study has some limitations that should be acknowledged. The first limitations lie to the self-report nature, cross-sectional design and recruitment method (online convenient sampling of non-clinical adults from Lebanon); which prevent causal inferences and generalization of our findings to the wider Arabic-speaking population. Future validations of the Arabic ZTPI-15 in clinical populations are still required. Another limitation consists of the fact that we did not assess other relevant psychometric properties of the ZTPI-15, such as test–retest reliability and predictive validity. Additional studies should consider addressing this limitation. In addition, while this study was able to confirm discriminant validity by correlation time perspective dimensions to depression, anxiety and stress, future studies still need to explore the patterns of correlations with other psychological and behavioral functioning (such as substance use, risky behaviors, coping strategies, and self-esteem). Information regarding the profession/occupation of the participants was not collected. Furthermore, given the method of recruitment, which was performed online, and mostly attracted educated and female participants, it is unlikely that our sample is representative of the wider Lebanese population. Consequently, the gender invariance results should be interpreted with caution because of the numbers inequality between males and females. Finally, while our sample comprises adults aged 65–85 years, we did not consider excluding persons with cognitive impairment, which could have influenced the results of our paper. Future studies should consider addressing this issue, while being aware that this may also decrease the clinical utility of research findings [
78].
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