Development and Validation of a Revised Measure of Individual Capacities for Tolerating Information Overload in Occupational Settings

Abstract

The anthropologist Edward Hall wrote extensively on the concept of polychronicity in which he documented the differences between people and cultures in the extent to which they differentially managed their daily activities in the context of space and time. In the work reported here, we have broadened the definition of the polychronicity concept that we define as the capacity of the individual to tolerate multiple sources of stimuli and information occurring in both time and space without suffering psychological distress or disorientation. In earlier work, summarized in several publications, we have constructed and validated a 25-item measure of individual capacity for tolerating stimulus loads across the following five information processing dimensions namely, information load, interpersonal load, change load, activity structure, and time structure. Several previous studies by our research group have found significant connections to a variety of behavioral criteria, including the capacity for visual and motor multitasking, arousal levels, speed of processing, and cross-cultural differences. In this article, we report on how we have augmented the number of items in each of the five dimensions, performed item analysis, reassessed the internal consistency reliability of the five subscales, and evaluated the validity of the new subscales against several criteria with a contemporary sample of 431 employed adults drawn from each of the Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional (RIASEC) categories of Holland’s taxonomy.