Temporal Future Focus Scale

What it measures

Measures the extent to which individuals (here, chief marketing officers) devote their attention to the future in planning, goal setting, and decision-making. From Shipp, Edwards, and Lambert (2009), who developed it as a facet of temporal focus theory. Used in a CMO survey context to predict sustainability marketing commitment in Vietnamese firms.

Response format

7-point Likert (1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree)

Scale items

• I think about what my future has in store.
• I think about times to come.
• I focus on my future.
• I imagine what tomorrow will bring for me.

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

Usage notes & scoring

Borrowed from Shipp, A.J., Edwards, J.R., & Lambert, L.S. (2009). Conceptualization and measurement of temporal focus: The subjective experience of the past, present, and future. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 110(1), 1–22. Original scale showed alpha = .89 in a US employee sample. Thu et al. applied it to Vietnamese CMOs with a back-translation procedure; CR = .81 in the CMO sample. Used in sustainability marketing commitment research.

Recommended companion scales

Citation

Thu, N.N.Q., Kadirov, D., Fam, K-S., & Tho, N.D. (2023). Firms' sustainability marketing commitment: The roles of chief marketing officers' future focus and prosocial motivation. Journal of Macromarketing, 43(3), 306–321.

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