As a central element of the socioemotional selectivity theory, individuals’ future time perspective (FTP) has recently attracted considerable attention in marketing. Lang and Carstensen (2002) provide a measurement scale for FTP, which has since been used by many academic researchers who univocally accept its original unidimensional reflective operationalisation. Challenging this assumption, we draw on data from three studies to systematically explore the scale’s psychometric properties. We find that the FTP scale comprises three dimensions rather than one. In a second step, the nature of the relationships between these dimensions and the more abstract higher-order FTP construct, as well as between the dimensions and their items, is explored. Our assessment of the scale’s predictive validity shows that the unidimensional operationalisation misleads researchers because dimension-specific effects become confounded in a composite effect. As such, this study takes a step towards advancing the FTP’s measurement and understanding its role in different research settings.
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