The General Flow Proneness Scale: Aspects of Reliability and Validity of a New 13-Item Scale Assessing Flow

Abstract

In this article, we report the development and validation of a new measure for flow proneness. The General Flow Proneness Scale is a quantitative measure which is simple to administer, and is context independent. Test-retest reliability was tested on 23 adults, 1 week apart. Intraclass correlation coefficient (ICCs) between the test and retest scores was .956. The General Flow Proneness Scale was further tested on 228 participants between 18 and 76 years of age (mean age = 34.66, SD = 14.75), which allowed for the exploration of applicability, internal consistency, and construct validity. The overall results indicate that the scale is applicable for the age studied (18–76). All individual item scores showed a positive correlation with the total score, and ranged between .20 and .67. The Cronbach’s alpha value was .78 for the standardized items. Pearson’s correlation coefficient between the total score of the General Flow Proneness Scale and the total score of the Swedish Flow Proneness Questionnaire including all domains was r = .573 (p \ .001); for the student group r = .645 (p \ .001); for the professionally active group r = .475 (p \ .001). These promising results warrant further development of the General Flow Proneness scale, including normalization based on a larger, representative sample.