Factor Structure of the Revised Indecisiveness Scale and Association with Risks for and Symptoms of Anxiety, Depression, and Attentional Control

Abstract

Indecisiveness is trait-like difficulty making decisions across time and situations. Past investigations indicate that indecisiveness is associated with Major Depressive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder as well as with neuroticism, Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU), and avoidance. The most used measure of indecisive is Frost and Shows’ (Behav Res Therapy, 1993. http://doi.org/10.1016/0005-7967(93)90121-a) Indecisiveness Scale (IS), which has been revised to remove situation-specific indecision items. Research evaluating the original and revised IS (RIS) has found diverse factors, ranging from one to three, and scale content, reflecting positive attitudes towards decision-making, fears about decision-making consequences, and decisional avoidance. Given this variability across investigations, we performed exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses using the revised IS to evaluate competing factor models. Our analyses supported a two-factor model with Aversive Indecisiveness (RIS-AI) and Positive Attitudes Towards Decision-Making (RIS-Positive) best fitting the data for 511 participants. We also found that RIS-AI was a unique predictor of anxious arousal, IU, and multiple forms of avoidance over RIS-Positive. RIS-AI was also a stronger positive predictor of worry, general emotional distress, and self-appraised difficulty with attentional focus than RIS-Positive. In contrast, RIS-Positive uniquely and negatively predicted self-appraised attentional shifting difficulty over RIS-AI. RIS-Positive was also a stronger negative predictor of anhedonic depression than RIS-AI. Our results indicate that assessment of indecisiveness should use the RIS-AI and RIS-Positive scales. RIS-AI clearly fits within the nomological network of anxiety. Our findings provide preliminary evidence that RIS-Positive would fit within the nomological network for decisional self-efficacy.