Arab Educational Information Network

The procrastination is an irrational behavior that may prevail in particular communities characterized by wasting time and waiting for miracles. Millions of people there are involved in delaying tasks and avoiding confrontation with the challenges and emerging tasks imposed by social and technological development of mankind. The current research suggests that the procrastination could be conceptualized as a result of "negative expectations towards self" (low self-efficacy), and of "negative expectations towards environmental events" (high future anxiety). To investigate this assumption, a predictive model was developed and tested, supposing that the procrastination could be predictable by these two psychological variably, individually and jointly. A sample of 137 students from the University of Baghdad was selected. A multidimensional scale of 72 items and nine subscales was developed to measure procrastination. The predictive model has been developed by using the required statistical analyses. The most important conclusions are the following: 1) The procrastination as a personality type seems more prevalent among college students than as a personality trait. 2) The procrastinators’ types most influenced by the motivational factor of emotional and moral satisfactions, ranked in the forefront of prevalence rates, followed by the procrastinators’ types influenced by the cognitive factor related to the perceptual distortions. 3) The extreme cases of self-efficacy predict adversely the procrastination. The future anxiety is not a mediator in this case. 4) The gender and academic discipline have no significant impact to predict the procrastination. Therefore, they could be excluded from the model. 5) The Worrier, Defier, and Crisis-Maker procrastinators could be positively predicted by future anxiety. Meanwhile, they could adversely predicted by self-efficacy when it interacts with future anxiety. 6) The procrastination trait and the Metaphysical and Incapable of Delaying Gratification Procrastinators, could be adversely predicted by self-efficacy. Meanwhile, they could positively predicted by future anxiety when it interacts with self-efficacy. Then several suggestions for future complementary studies were introduced. (Published Abstract)