The Children's Future Thinking Questionnaire (CFTQ)
Mazachowsky, T. R., & Mahy, C. E. V. (2020). Construction of the children’s future thinking questionnaire: A reliable and valid parent-report measure of children’s future-oriented cognition. Developmental Psychology, 56, 756-772. [PDF]
Our lab has developed a reliable and valid parent-questionnaire to measure 3- to 7-year-olds' future oriented cognition in the domains of planning, prospective memory, delay of gratification, saving, and episodic foresight. It is called the Children's Future Thinking Questionnaire (Mazachowsky & Mahy, 2020).
Infographic created by Lydia Lavis.
The Children's Future Thinking Questionnaire is 44-items and shows strong psychometric properties including strong internal consistency of the five subscales and full scale, excellent test-retest reliability, and good validity (parent's responses are correlated with children's behavioural performance on lab tasks). The questionnaire is meant to tap into children's future-oriented behaviour broadly and is an excellent addition to traditional laboratory behavioural measures of children's performance. You can read more about the reliability and validity of the CFTQ in our paper in Developmental Psychology. The paper contains 4 studies that describe the development, refinement, and testing of the psychometric properties of the CFTQ.
It takes parents 10 to 15 minutes to complete and can be administered in person or online.
The final questionnaire is freely available to researchers on this webpage. Please fill out the contact form at the bottom of the page if you are interested in using the questionnaire and it will be sent to you along with a scoring guide.
The CFTQ could be adapted for use with children older than 3- to 7-years-old. It was designed so that basic items could stay the same, but age-appropriate examples could be substituted for the current examples appropriate for young children.
It takes parents 10 to 15 minutes to complete and can be administered in person or online.
The final questionnaire is freely available to researchers on this webpage. Please fill out the contact form at the bottom of the page if you are interested in using the questionnaire and it will be sent to you along with a scoring guide.
The CFTQ could be adapted for use with children older than 3- to 7-years-old. It was designed so that basic items could stay the same, but age-appropriate examples could be substituted for the current examples appropriate for young children.
Here is an article about the Children's Future Thinking Questionnaire published in The Brock News:
Publications using the Children's Future Thinking Questionnaire
Coming soon
Supplemental Files
(Mazachowsky & Mahy, 2020)
These files are being made available so that researchers can see how behavioural tasks were administered in Study 2 and 3 of our paper on the development of the Children's Future Thinking Questionnaire.
Behavioural Task Script from Study 2
Behavioural Task Script from Study 3
(Mazachowsky & Mahy, 2020)
These files are being made available so that researchers can see how behavioural tasks were administered in Study 2 and 3 of our paper on the development of the Children's Future Thinking Questionnaire.
Behavioural Task Script from Study 2
Behavioural Task Script from Study 3
