Dysfunctional Travel Spending Scale

What it measures

Measures the extent to which a consumer engaged in financially undisciplined spending behaviours during a trip, including avoidance of budget monitoring, impulse purchasing, erratic shopping decisions, and greater-than-anticipated expenditure. Higher scores indicate more dysfunctional spending patterns.

Scale items

• During your _____ trip, when thinking about your trip spending, to what extent have you: thrown your hands up and figured you'll deal with it after the trip is over?
• During your _____ trip, when thinking about your trip spending, to what extent have you: pushed financial concerns out of your mind?
• During your _____ trip, when thinking about your trip spending, to what extent have you: tried not to think about how much you were spending?
• During your _____ trip, when thinking about your trip spending, to what extent have you: decided to forego budgeting during this trip?
• During your _____ trip, when thinking about your trip spending, to what extent have you: found yourself making erratic shopping decisions and not shopping as carefully?
• During your _____ trip, when thinking about your trip spending, to what extent have you: made purchases impulsively?
• Compared to what you originally anticipated, did you spend . . . [spent much less than expected / spent the same as expected / spent much more than expected]

Full scale items shown. Always cite the original source when using this scale in research.

Usage notes & scoring

Developed by Fernbach et al. (2015) for Study 4 of a paper examining how consumers cope with resource constraint. Administered to 75 business students at the University of Colorado Boulder, with 'spring break' as the focal trip. The scale stem asks about behaviours during a specified trip, with a placeholder for the trip name. Item 7 uses different anchors from items 1-6; the exact wording was reconstructed from a paraphrased description in the original article and should be treated with caution.

Citation

Fernbach, P. M., Kan, C., & Lynch, J. G., Jr. (2015). Squeezed: Coping with constraint through efficiency and prioritization. Journal of Consumer Research, 41(5), 1204–1227.