Regulatory Focus Strategies Scale: A measure of individual differences in the endorsement of regulatory strategies

Abstract

Regulatory focus theory proposes that people can have a promotion or a prevention focus when pursuing goals and choosing strategies. The Regulatory Focus Strategies Scale (RFSS), a scale that assesses the endorsement of promotion and prevention strategies for goal pursuit, is developed and validated in three studies. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses in Australia and Japan showed that promotion-and prevention-focused strategic endorsement formed two largely uncorrelated factors. The RFSS exhibits adequate reliability, and discriminant and convergent validity. A cross-cultural comparison showed that Australians were more promotion-but less prevention-focused than Japanese students. The RFSS provides an additional measure that is useful in future research on self-regulatory strategies.

Promotion, Prevention or Both: Regulatory Focus and Culture Revisited

“…Though most of the findings of that survey (especially the ranking of the promotion-prevention gap) support the traditional view, the highlighted ones point out to possible complications. Ouschan et al (2007) present supporting findings as well. Using their scales they showed that Asian-Australians were higher than Euro-Australian in prevention, as expected, but unexpectedly the same direction was evident for promotion.…”

“…Accordingly, it is highly likely that they endorse the two types of motivations (Chiu & Hong, 2007). The same is true for Asian origin people living in Australia: they are exposed to socialization that encourages prevention within their culture of origin, but are exposed to promotion expectations in the context of their host culture (Ouschan et al, 2007). An even less conservative explanation is that the strive for self-improvement, that is a guiding value in Japan (Heine, Lehman, Markus & Kitayama, 1999;Heine et al, 2001;Heine, Takata, & Lehman, 2000) and maybe in other East-Asian cultures (Kurman et al, in press), includes promotion tendencies in it, at least in the achievement domain.…”

“…Measurement wise, the independence of promotion and prevention was showed many times. In fact, all existing scales were found to be either uncorrelated Ouschan, Boldero, Kashima, Wakimoto, & Kashima, 2007) or even reveal weak positive correlations (Haws, Dholakia, & Bearden, 2010;Lockhood et al, 2002). It is therefore possible that cultures can be characterized as low or high on both regulatory foci.…”

“…In promotion pride (η p 2 =.11), the Israeli-Arab group was the lowest, but the Hong Kong group was significantly higher than Israeli-Jews. Another measure of regulatory focus (Ouschan et al, 2007) pertains to the way tasks are approached (for example: "Taking risks is essential for success" for promotion, and "To achieve something, one must be cautious" for prevention). A statistical comparisons of different samples of the same cultural groups (N = 418) yielded almost the same pattern of cross-cultural differences.…”

Regulatory Focus: A Promising Concept for Marketing Research

“…Conversely, prevention focused subjects, in order to avoid making mistakes and negative outcomes, concentrate on negative signals (Kirmani and Zhu, 2007). Similarly, RF influences -problem of adapting the scale to other cultural contexts and other populations (Semin et al, 2005) -doubt as to discriminant validity: items concerning, for example, the importance of obligations and duties may be confused with collectivism (Ouschan et al, 2007) (Summerville and Roese, 2008) -problem of adapting the scale to other cultural contexts and other populations (Semin et al, 2005) Regulatory Focus Strategies Scale (RFSS) (Ouschan et al, 2007) -Measure of subjects' perceived utility in relation to strategies associated with promotion or prevention focus -16 items (8 measuring acceptance of strategies associated with promotion focus and 8 acceptance of strategies associated with prevention focus) -Low correlation with the currently used scale Regulatory Focus Scale (RFS) (Fellner et al, 2007) -Measurement instrument developed to counter certain limitations of other instruments: distant events, social desirability, and sample (students) -10 items (5 -promotion and 5 -prevention) -good psychometric quality -Similar limitations to other scales Regulatory focus at work (Neubert et al, 2008) -Scale developed to measure RF in a work environment -Prevention orientation: the effort that the subject makes to obtain security, fulfill his obligations and minimize his losses -Promotion orientation: the effort that the subject makes to pursue his aspirations, and obtain and maximize gains -18 items (9 items -prevention and 9 items -promotion)…”