2.4.3. Brief Self-Control Scale (BSCS)

In order to measure self-control, the Brief Self-Control Scale (BSCS; Tangney et al., 2004) was selected because it is a widely used and well-validated measure of self-control (Duckworth and Kern, 2011; Fung et al., 2019; Lindner et al., 2015). The BSCS is a brief self-report questionnaire that consists of 13 items (Tangney et al., 2004), which means that it is easily administrable. The BSCS measures trait self-control via items with a 5-point Likert scale, where 1 refers to ‘not at all’ and 5 to ‘extremely’, so higher scores represent higher levels of self-control. Examples of items are ‘I am good at resisting temptation’ and ‘Pleasure and fun sometimes keep me from getting work done’. In the pilot study, the Cronbach's alpha of the BSCS at the five measuring moments ranged between 0.786 and 0.911, showing an overall high reliability (Da Silva, 2019). In the present study, the Cronbach's alpha of the four measurements of the BSCS ranged between 0.790 and 0.852, showing a good internal consistency at all measuring moments and is comparable to the original BSCS Cronbach's alpha values: 0.83 and 0.85 (Tangney et al., 2004). At t1, the original version of the scale was used while at t2, t3 and t4 slight adaptations in phrasing were added to ensure that the BSCS covered self-control over the past five days.