A Narrative Review of the Literature on Academic Delay of Gratification Construct

Abstract

Most of the research on academic delay of gratification, a vital academic variable, is available in foreign context. Research studies on this construct on Indian students at secondary, higher secondary and tertiary levels and a subsequent body of its literature are warranted. This is call for an awareness of the already available edifice of research work on this construct. The present study is a narrative review of the available literature on academic delay of gratification in a chronological manner. Electronic databases like Mandeley, Pub Med, ERIC and Google Scholar were used as data sources. Literature in the form of research articles and review articles were searched. The works with the exact keyword in their title were selected for study, and the literature on related keywords was strictly ignored, except a few seminal papers on a closely related variable, delay of gratification. The literature review included research articles starting from the first published work that linked the variable delay of gratification to enhanced academic performance by Walter Mischel et al. in 1990 to the latest research work done in 2016 by the researcher. Qualitative analysis was done on the selected articles for review. The study found that most of the research on this variable was conducted only on college students, followed by secondary school, middle school, higher secondary school and elementary school students as samples, respectively. The Indian version of the original ADOG scale is not available yet. These findings can pave way for further research on academic delay of gratification in India.