| Summary: | The personal
pattern of coping with the stress associated with making decisions
characterizes the way an individual makes choices and judgments. The Melbourne
Decision Making Questionnaire (MDMQ) analyses these personal patterns and has
been used across various cultures in order to assess four main strategies:
vigilance, buck-passing, procrastination, and hypervigilance. We sought to
adapt and validate a Portuguese version of the MDMQ. Our study was conducted
with a sample of 523 Portuguese people aged 18 or older. The questionnaire
retained the original four scales, which represent four different decisional
patterns, showing good reliability and validity – concurrent as well as
predictive – and invariance for gender and age. The coping pattern with the
highest mean was vigilance, while procrastination had the lowest mean. In
contrast to other studies of the MDMQ, our sample had a more diversified
distribution of age. Young adults were less capable than older adults of
managing stress when making decisions, due to their higher levels of
buck-passing, hypervigilance, and procrastination. Vigilance showed stronger
correlations to positive affect, satisfaction with life, and better decisional
self-esteem, while the remaining scales were related to negative affect,
reduced decisional self-esteem, and lower satisfaction with life. These
decision-making styles are chosen depending on time constraints, pressure, or
other contextual characteristics. These results suggest that individuals resort
to more convenient patterns according to their situation, and that these
patterns of decision-making can be trained, developed, and improved.
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