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The generalizability of temporal focus profiles across cultures: A secondary analysis using data from Japan and the United Kingdom

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Highlights

  • Temporal Focus Clusters were developed in Japanese and UK adolescent data

  • Three of the four clusters were similar in nature

  • Cultural differences emerged in terms of how clusters relate to self-esteem

  • Lower self-esteem in the UK was associated with Past Focus

  • Lower self-esteem in Japan was associated with No Focus

Abstract

Studies examining time perspective have increased exponentially in recent years, driven by advances in measurement sophistication. Additionally the literature about time perspective has seen a move toward person-centered analyses, away from bivariate or correlational analyses. The Temporal Focus Scale is a relatively new measure that assesses cognitive engagement with the past, present and future. This is the first study to examine the viability of person-centered analyses using this scale across cultures, and to assess how temporal focus clusters relate to criterion variables. Participants were school children in Japan and the United Kingdom. Results show that a four cluster solution was best in both countries, with three broadly similar clusters emerging across the two sites. Lower self-esteem in the United Kingdom was associated with being in the Past Focussed cluster, while in Japan, lower self-esteem was associated with being in the No Focus cluster.

Introduction

The study of time perspective, the degree to which cognitions and feelings about the past, present and future influence behavior, has increased rapidly in recent years. This growth has been partly driven by the development of new measurement instruments, and the refinement of previously developed ones. Additional to the longer-established Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI; (Zimbardo & Boyd, 1999)), other measures have been developed which have been purposive attempts to assess more nuanced aspects of time perspective. Notably, the Temporal Focus Scale (TFS; (Shipp, Edwards, & Schurer-Lambert, 2009)) was developed to assess the cognitive (how people think) dimension of time perspective.

Adolescence is a particularly interesting life-stage in which to assess time perspective as developmental theory suggests that with the transition from childhood to adolescence (Erikson, 1968, Piaget, 1955), individuals' time perspectives will change. Moreover, as a transition period from childhood to adulthood, adolescence is characterised by a need to make decisions and preparations that will have long-term life consequences (e.g. (Nurmi, 2002)). Additionally, adolescence is a period of emotional and psychological change, and the intensity of these changes can result in stress (Moksnes, Byrne, Mazanov, & Espnes, 2010) which can, in turn, have an adverse impact on self-esteem. Understanding the degree (if at all) to which time perspective relates to adolescent self-esteem is therefore potentially useful.

The majority of temporal studies to date have used bivariate or correlational analyses to assess how specific dimensions (for example scores on past or future) of time perspective relate to scores on criterion variables. However, a weakness in this approach is that individuals relate to the past, present and future to matters of degree, and concurrently, therefore it seems important to simultaneously account for scores on all of these dimensions when assessing how they relate to criterion variables. Accordingly, recent studies have employed person-centered analyses, using heuristic cluster analysis (e.g., (Andretta, Worrell, & Mello, 2014)) to better account for the totality of temporal experience when assessing its relation to criterion variables. For example, Andretta et al. (Andretta et al., 2014) showed that clusters of Positives and Pessimists differed on academic attainment with a moderate effect size, although attitudes toward specific time periods themselves were not predictive of these outcomes. Cluster analysis is used to develop categories, so that individuals within categories have multiple, co-occurring time attitudes or cognitions that are as similar as possible, and as dissimilar as possible with individuals between categories (Bergman, Magnusson, & El-Khouri, 2003).

While this analytical approach has been applied to other time perspective scales (Andretta et al., 2014, Cole et al., 2016), we are not aware of any such analyses having been undertaken with the TFS. Additionally, because of a dearth of research on the generalizability of clusters across cultures (Sircova, Van De Vijer, Osin, et al., 2015), and the fact that culture influences how individuals perceive and conceptualise time (Jones & Leitner, 2015), the present study sought to compare TFS clusters in UK and Japanese adolescents. Although this is the first study to examine temporal focus clusters, we hypothesized that, in line with other studies using other temporal scales (e.g., (Cole et al., 2016, Higata and Saito, 2007, Shirai, 1997)) membership of a future temporal cluster would be optimal, with the reverse true for a past profile. The only additional data that were gathered in both countries (and therefore useful as a criterion measure) were data on self-esteem. We also examined how membership of TFS clusters was related to scores on self-esteem.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants in the UK were 676 adolescents (Mean age = 14.67, SD = 1.77; 59.5% male) recruited from seven high schools in Northern Ireland. Participants in Japan were 965 adolescents (Mean age = 15.08, SD = 1.77; male = 45.6%). These were recruited from one junior high school and two high schools in the Kanto district in Japan. Both studies were given ethical approval by the relevant university ethics committee and all participants gave informed consent.

Measures

The Temporal Focus Scale, TFS (Shipp et al., 2009

Results

Although the size of the correlations between TFS and self-esteem scores were different in magnitude between the Japanese and UK samples (Table 1), it is noteworthy that only one correlation coefficient met Ferguson's (Ferguson, 2009) criteria for a moderate effect size. The results of the cluster analyses suggested that a four cluster solution emerged as best in both samples (see Fig. 1, Fig. 2), with three broadly similar clusters. These were labelled: Past Focussed, characterised by elevated

Discussion

The present study examined the viability and generalizability of TFS clusters in UK and Japanese adolescents. Results revealed three broadly similar clusters, with the fourth cluster being quite different. How people focus in terms of time has been shown to affect how they incorporate perceptions about past experiences, current situations, and future expectations into their attitudes, cognitions, and behavior (Shipp et al., 2009), and in adolescents, has been shown to relate to health

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      Shipp et al. (2009) argued that it may be beneficial to use measures that separate out the amount of time spent thinking about specific time periods from one’s attitudes and feelings about such periods. To this end, they developed the Temporal Focus Scale (TFS) to assess only levels of cognitive engagement with the past, present and future, with high levels of future temporal focus being associated with life satisfaction, optimism and risk-taking in adults (Busseri, Malinowski, & Choma, 2013; Shipp et al., 2009), and life satisfaction, career efficacy and self-esteem in adolescents (Chishima, McKay, & Cole, 2017; Chishima, McKay, & Murakami, 2017). While the TFS is intended to purely assess levels of cognitive engagement with the future, it is possible to assess adolescents’ affective evaluations of the future using measures such as the Adolescent Time Inventory - Time Attitude scale (ATI-TA; Mello and Worrell, 2007Mello & Worrell, 2007).

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