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Thank you for your revised version, this can now be accepted for publication
[# PeerJ Staff Note: We apologize for the delay in this decision #]
The paper follows the required article structure.
The analysis is properly carried out.
The findings shed little light on the predictors of this stressor. The focus on personality traits is an anathema to stress process researchers who are interested in the social predictors of stress exposure and stress outcomes such as depression, anger, and anxiety.
I am satisfied that the authors have in their paper, sufficiently acknowledged my prior work on time pressure scale development. However, my original view of the scientific contribution of the paper has not changed - I see it as the wrong direction to take research on time pressure, but that's just my opinion.
The authors have Appealed the original Rejection decision on this submission. The previous academic editor is no longer able to progress this submission and therefore as a Section Editor of the PeerJ Brain, Cognition and Mental Health Section, I have taken over.
Reviewer 3 makes a number of points in relation to their own work in this area. As part of the Appeal process, I am changing the decision to Major Revisions, and ask that you revise your paper and address or rebut each of the specific points raised by this reviewer. Once you have resubmitted a revised version we will send this out to review to an independent reviewer for comment.
[# PeerJ Staff Note - in Appeal situations, any revised resubmission will still need to be evaluated by the Editorial process, and so a positive outcome is not guaranteed #]
Regarding the Reviewer, who takes great pains to stress (forgive the pun) their perceived expertise, they supply four dated citations (see below). Of these, one was included within the Szollos (2009) Review (see citations below). Oddly, and she contributed to the Szollos (2009) Review, that article overlooked two of the three citations produced within the timeframe. So she previously endorsed/assisted with a paper that made the same points as we did and that cited ONLY one of the supposedly essential reference. Bizarre.
Accordingly, there are no grounds to support Roxburgh’s contention that these are seminal. I am not sure why you would deem something central – when you did not make the same point 15-20 years ago. Clearly, forgot or overlooked this inconsistency.
It is clear that the Reviewer has little or no understanding of statistics or scale development. The Reviewer is a sociologist and refers to important analyses as “There is a veritable blizzard of technical information deployed so I don’t think it is unreasonable to ask what this armory of technical skill yields.” I am at a loss for words at this crass statement. The paper is extending scale validation – what does she expect to see in a psychometric based paper? This is either due to disciplinary bias or absence of research activity over the past decade. The days when you simply generated a few items and looked at internal consistency have long gone. Indeed, the reporting of item development in her paper is understated and validation scant. It assumes also – wrongly that Time Pressure is strictly unidimensional, which it is potentially not. This is indeed the point Szollos made “CTP is conceptualized here as comprised of the probably overlapping components of chronic time shortage and constantly being rushed”. I see no evidence of Roxburgh’s analysis exploring this (see below).
Roxburgh References (first three produced prior to the Szollos review BUT not included)
Roxburgh, Susan. 2002. ‘Racing Through Life’: The Distribution of Time Pressures by Roles and Role Resources among Full-Time Workers.’ Journal of Family and Economic Issues, 23:121-145
Roxburgh, Susan. 2004. ‘There Just Aren’t Enough Hours in the Day’:The Mental Health Consequences of Time Pressures.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 32:115-131.
Roxburgh, Susan. 2006. ‘I wish we had more time to spend together...: The Distribution and Predictors of Perceived Family Time Pressures among Married Men and Women in the Paid Labor Force.’ Journal of Family Issues 27:1-25.
This one is not particularly relevant to scale development.
Roxburgh, Susan. 2012. ‘Parental Time Pressures and Depression among Married Dual-Earner Parents.’ Journal of Family Issues 33:1027-53.
Szollos sections referencing Roxburgh
Although there is a body of psychological literature on the social psychology of time (e.g. Levine, 1997), and a number of studies on time pressure (e.g. Roxburgh, 2004),
However, leisure studies (Haworth and Veal, 2004; Kasser and Brown, 2003), recent work–family balance research (e.g. Bianchiet al., 2005), investigations on mental health and time pressure (e.g. Roxburgh, 2004)
The accelerated pace of life, temporal overload, performing activities faster and multitasking are also addressed under the terms of ‘work intensification’ (e.g. Burchell et al., 2002; Menzies and Newson, 2007), ‘time pressure’ (e.g. Kinicki and Vecchio, 1994; Lee and McGrath, 1995; Teuchman et al., 1999; Gunthorpe and Lyons, 2004; Roxburgh, 2004) and as an accelerated, ‘high-speed’ and networked 24/7 society (Hassan and Purser, 2007).
Time pressure is already established in the extant literature (Kinicki and Vecchio, 1994; Lee and McGrath, 1995; Garhammer, 2002; Gunthorpe and Lyons, 2004; Roxburgh, 2004) and mirrors well the human experience connoted in all the other terms used.
Although there are no established measures, a composite of several sets of overlapping items appearing in ‘time pressure’ scales (Kinicki and
Vecchio, 1994; Lee and McGrath, 1995; Garhammer, 2002; Roxburgh, 2004)
If a 15 year old review makes sparse reference to Roxburgh I am not sure why a contemporary one would give her star billing. This is rather unreasonable. Given that Szollos references one paper – it is perfectly appropriate that we reference the same one, which refers to measurement.
Your paper was well-written, Two of the reviewers thought it was publishable. I am sorry to say, that one of the reviewers, who has done a lot of work on chronic time pressure and its measurement, found your work to be derivative and not to credit the work she did that you were building on. I find her arguments convincing and thus have decided on rejection. I think you might try another journal after you carefully incorporate Reviewer 3's comments.
[# PeerJ Staff Note - this decision was reviewed and approved by Jafri Abdullah, a PeerJ Section Editor covering this Section #]
[# PeerJ Staff Note: Reviewer 3 declared a potential Conflict of Interest, and the Editor was aware of this when making their decision #]
Review for
PeerJ
The Chronic Time Pressure Inventory: Further assessment of factorial structure and validity
This study examines the CTPI. This is a useful tool for understanding people’s feelings of daily pressure to complete their tasks. The manuscript is well-written and the psychometric tests and explanations are acceptable.
Abstract:
Is well written.
Introduction:
The introduction is well written.
Methods
The Methods section is well written.
Results:
The Results section is well written. I wonder if the authors tried to build another model using three factors, in which one of them would be the affective factor (disappointment, worry). This might solve some of the psychometric problems.
Discussion:
Future research should include personality traits such as perfectionism and procrastination.
No comment
Study 1. Sample (81% females; 18.5% males) (p.6)
Study 2 Sample (78% females; 21 males)
In the case of an instrument validation, the symmetry of subsamples based on gender is important. The bias of gender can be a problem for this type of studies. At least, this aspect should be mentioned at the limits of the study.
No comment
No comment
Not Applicable - this is not an experiment
Not novel or impactful.
I was asked to review this paper because of my prior work on time pressure. In addition, to the paper under review, I read the earlier work by the first and second authors, particularly their 2019 paper, ‘Development and evaluation of the chronic time pressure.’ In that paper, the authors argue that there is a need for a time pressure measure because there are no other scales that measure this construct. I don’t believe this is an accurate statement because in my 2004 paper, which they cite (and in a 2002 paper, which they do not cite), I describe my own measure of time pressure, which is quite similar to theirs. Appended to this review is a side-by-side comparison of their items with mine.
In spite of the similarities between my time pressure scale and theirs, in their 2019 paper, on Pp. 3 the author’s state: The current study represented the first step in the development of an established measure of CTP.
This statement is preceded by a paragraph that gives several examples of the ways that other psychologists and sociologists have measured time pressure which pointedly ignores my work and yet further down on Pp. 10, the authors refer to the ‘Time Pressures Scale,’ and provide my 2004 paper as the citation (i.e., that would suggest they are aware of my time pressures scale). Since the authors seem to be aware that in the 2004 paper I provide a detailed discussion of the Time Pressure scale, why is my work not more clearly acknowledged?
With respect to their discussion of my work, in one instance, on Pp. 4 of the 2019 paper they cite my 2004 paper as showing that time pressure is associated with distress. This is accurate – that’s what my work is about – i.e., whether time pressure is associated with distress – is it a stressor? – and how this association varies by gender, roles, etc. But in another instance, in their 2023 paper, also published in this journal, they write: acute time pressure often causes stress (Roxburgh, 2004). This is either a misunderstanding of my work or at very misleading. My scale is clearly intended to measure chronic time pressure, not acute time pressure. For example, the scale prompt I used asked, ‘in the last 30 days how often have you….?’ This is intentional because I was interested in the chronic experience of time pressure – how a sustained pervasive sense of urgency and time shortage which seems so much a part of contemporary life to the point where it is actually prestigious to have too much to do, is associated with distress.
Several of my most important conclusions over four papers, which also touch on time pressures associated with family life, are that income and gender moderate and/or mediate the association between time pressure and mental health. For example, income moderates the association between time pressure and distress such that highly time-pressured affluent individuals are significantly less distressed than their low-income counterparts (i.e., affluence allows for the experience of the prestige associated with being in high demand and having too much to do with none of the costs that low-income individuals experience). I also find that time pressure explains the higher distress of women (taking their higher time pressure into account explains the gap in distress between employed mothers and fathers). Readers of this review interested in my other findings can consult the references provided below.
On the question of the merits of the paper I’ve been asked to review, I find it difficult to muster a lot of intellectual excitement at the approach taken to the phenomenon of time pressure because it is so antithetical to my own interest in this issue. The tradition of stress process in which I work takes the view that social conditions influence variation in stress outcomes such as distress, anxiety, depressive symptoms, and anger. So the question of how chronic time pressure is related to the big five personality traits just won’t seem like the right question to stress process researchers and indeed, to most sociologists. Stress process researchers are also at pains not to confound stress outcomes with stressors, which is a distinction that the authors don’t take any interest in. For example, on line 46, they state; Convergent/discriminant validity analyses inferred that the CTPI captured chronic time pressure as a related, but distinct, construct to perceived stress. This confounds stress outcomes with stressors when these are conceptually distinct phenomena.
Even taken on its face and trying to put aside the fact that this question about time pressure is antithetical to my approach, I have some difficulty understanding what we learn from this paper. There is a veritable blizzard of technical information deployed so I don’t think it is unreasonable to ask what this armory of technical skill yields. On line 378, we are informed that; researchers should administer the full measure rather than separate subscales, but this is a 13-item scale with two factors, so it seems unlikely that anyone using this scale would be all that worried about making the scale more parsimonious. Surely the question of whether one administers all or a subset of a scale only really comes up when using scales with more than forty or so items? Even if I was interested in whether the experience of time pressure varied by personality traits in some systematic way, I would need considerably more theory development to convince me that this was a useful direction for future research.
So on its merits, my view is that this paper makes an insufficient contribution to the literature. The issue of acknowledgment of my work and the overlap between my scale and what the authors claim is their unique contribution in this paper and in several already published papers remains to be addressed.
References:
Roxburgh, Susan. 2002. ‘Racing Through Life’: The Distribution of Time Pressures by Roles and Role Resources among Full-Time Workers.’ Journal of Family and Economic Issues, 23:121-145
Roxburgh, Susan. 2004. ‘There Just Aren’t Enough Hours in the Day’:The Mental Health Consequences of Time Pressures.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 32:115-131.
Roxburgh, Susan. 2006. ‘I wish we had more time to spend together...: The Distribution and Predictors of Perceived Family Time Pressures among Married Men and Women in the Paid Labor Force.’ Journal of Family Issues 27:1-25.
Roxburgh, Susan. 2012. ‘Parental Time Pressures and Depression among Married Dual-Earner Parents.’ Journal of Family Issues 33:1027-53.
Table 1. Comparison between Denovan & Dagnall (2019) & Roxburgh (2002, 2004)
Denovan & Dagnall Roxburgh
There aren’t enough hours in the day There just don’t seem to be enough hours in the day
I have enough time to do the things I want to do. Similar to: You feel rushed to do the things you have
to do
I feel pressured to fit everything in
The days fly by w/o me ever getting everything done Similar to: you feel rushed to do the things you
have to do
I am often in a hurry You are often in a hurry
I feel in control of how I spend my time
I should have more free time to do the things I enjoy
I worry about how well I use my time You worry about how you are using your time
I have enough time to properly prepare for things Similar to: You feel rushed to do the things you have
to do
I think I won’t finish work that I set out to do You never seem to have enough time to get
everything done
I feel disappointed with how I spend my time You worry about how you are using your time
I always run out of time You are always running out of time
I feel rushed to do the things that I have to do You feel rushed to do the things you have to do
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