Captures a person's in-the-moment sense of lacking control over events and their own fate. Unlike most locus of control measures, which assess stable trait-level beliefs, this scale uses explicit temporal anchoring ('right now') to focus respondents on their current state. It does not identify any external agent as responsible — only that the respondent feels their control is absent. Items were reverse-scored by the original authors to produce a measure of current perceived control. Validated in a stress and spending study with 70 MTurk participants.
9-point Likert (1=definitely disagree, 9=definitely agree)
Full scale items shown. Always cite the original source when using this scale in research.
Items use 'right now' framing — suited to state/situational measurement rather than stable trait assessment. Reverse score all items to reframe as perceived control. Uses a 9-point response scale rather than the more common 7-point.
Durante, K.M., & Laran, J. (2016). The effect of stress on consumer saving and spending. Journal of Marketing Research, 53(5), 814–828.
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